Tilde won the money and use of LUMI to develop a large language model (LLM) for small European languages.

“Global companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are focusing on English and other major languages,” the chairman of Tilde Group’s board, Artūras Vasiļevskis, was quoted in a statement as saying.

“ChatGPT’s results in major languages are of much higher quality than in Lithuanian, Latvian, and other smaller European languages. The European Commission prize money and access to one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers will allow our team to work on incorporating Lithuanian, Latvian and other European languages into AI solutions.”

The Large AI Grand Challenge was intended to “foster the development of large-scale AI models in Europe and substantially increase the visibility of Europe’s activity in this field,” according to the competition’s website.

Tilde said on the X platform that the prize money and two million GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hours—a metric used to measure computational resources in deep learning for AI—on the LUMI supercomputer in Finland, would help it to “develop a foundational LLM that enhances linguistic inclusivity across European languages.”

Tilde is a language technology company with offices in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn that offers services which include machine translation, localization, and AI chatbots.