EU awards four innovative European AI startups, SMEs

(ANSA) - ROME, JUN 27 - European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton has awarded four European artificial intelligence (AI) startup prizes from the Large AI Grand Challenge, launched on November 23 last year, the European Commission said on Wednesday.
    The Grand Challenge aims to reward innovative startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for devising ambitious strategies and committing to the development of large-scale AI models that will provide a competitive edge for Europe.
    The winners are Tilde (Latvia), an NLP and machine translation; Textgain (Belgium), an AI startup that enables companies and governments to gain valuable insights from unstructured data; Lingua Custodia (France), a Fintech company specialising in AI/natural language processing for finance; and Unable (Portugal), a language technologies company with headquarters in Lisbon.
    These companies will share a prize of a total of one million euros and will gain access to two of Europe's world-leading supercomputers, Lumi or Leonardo, for eight million hours.
    The supercomputer time will be used to develop innovative large-scale AI models in the 12 months following the awards granted on June 26.
    The winners will then be expected to release the developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use, or through publishing their research findings.
    The Large AI Grand Challenge was organised by the EU-funded project AI-BOOST and is part of the European Union's commitment to drive excellence in AI.
    photo: Breton (ANSA).