AI Sweden contributes to the development of open LLMs for transparent AI in Europe

A consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland) will build a family of performant, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial and public services. The transparent and compliant open-source models will democratize access to high-quality AI technologies and strengthen the ability of European companies to compete on a global market and public organizations to produce impactful public services.

The OpenEuroLLM project is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty. The project is a prime example of the type of technology infrastructure needed to lower thresholds for European AI product development and refinement, demonstrating the strength of transparency, openness and community involvement, values largely recognized across the European tech ecosystem. The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence.

Cooperating with open-source and open science communities like LAION, open-sci and OpenML, and additional experts in the field assembled in the project’s Open Strategic Partnership Board, OpenEuroLLM will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs. These performant multilingual models preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity, enabling European companies to develop high-quality products and services in the era of AI.

The project, which has been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, leverages support from previous European projects and the experience of the partners and their results, including large repositories of high-quality data and pilot LLMs developed previously. The consortium commences its work on February 1st, 2025, with funding from the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme.

Full list of partners

Universities and Research Organizations

Charles University (Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics), Czechia (coordinator)

Alliance for Language Technologies EDIC (ALT-EDIC), France

Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands 

ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Germany

Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany

Lindholmen Science Park (AI Sweden), Sweden

Research Center Juelich, Germany 

University of Helsinki, Finland

University of Oslo, Norway

University of Turku, Finland

University of Tübingen (Tübingen AI Center), Germany

Companies

Silo GenAI (AMD Silo AI), Finland (co-lead)

Aleph Alpha Research, Germany 

ellamind, Germany 

LightOn, France 

Prompsit Language Engineering, Spain  

EuroHPC centres

Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

Cineca Interuniversity Consortium, Italy 

CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland

SURF, the Netherlands