One year has elapsed since the start of the OpenEuroLLM project. This ambitious project carried out by a consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres, coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by AMD Silo AI, has been busy with the first steps of developing next-generation open-source language models to advance European AI capabilities.

The project's main goal requires extensive research, access to high-performance computing resources, and strategic collaboration with other prominent European initiatives. During its inaugural year, the project has achieved significant milestones in advancing regional AI sovereignty through targeted efforts in digital infrastructure development, data practices, model development, and evaluation tools.

“Creating an open source multilingual LLM in the public space and within a large consortium is a challenging task. I am proud that thanks to the expertise, enthusiasm, commitment and hard work of especially the core partners the project has achieved its first-year goals. However, significant challenges, especially in securing more compute for creating the final models, still remain,” says Jan Hajič, Charles University.