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.
Competitive language models with transparency, openness and community involvement
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, 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.
Tübingen AI Center contributes to building and evaluating Open Source and Compliant AI within a Strong International Community
The Tübingen AI Center will contribute to the project's technical deliverables focused on training and evaluating a highly multilingual family of foundational models. Beyond the scientific goals, the project prioritizes creating a strong community around foundation models to ensure their accessibility and widespread adoption. The Tübingen AI Center will lead these community-building efforts, bringing together various stakeholders to support the project's open-source mission. This entails coordinating strategic advice from an international board of AI experts to ensure high-level alignment with existing communities and initiatives as well as EU policies. The project will also strengthen ties with businesses, small enterprises, and high-performance computing (HPC) networks. The goal is to build a lasting commitment to the development and use of open-source AI models, ensuring that key stakeholders remain engaged both during and after the project.