The European Commission has announced the winners of the Grand AI Challenge: four innovative AI start-ups from Europe will share a prize of €1 million and 8 million computing hours to advance Europe's leadership in AI development.
At the award ceremony in Berlaymont, Brussels, Commissioner Thierry Breton presented awards to the winners of the Grand Challenge of Artificial Intelligence.
The winners are:
Lingua Custodia (France) – A fintech company specializing in artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) in the financial sector, enhancing operations in the fintech industry by enabling solutions that are five times faster than existing systems.
Unbabel (Portugal) - A Lisbon-based language technology company that combines artificial intelligence and human translation to provide multilingual support in all 24 official languages of the European Union.
Tilde (Latvia) – linguistic technologist providing machine translation and artificial intelligence chatbots for the Baltic-Slavic languages spoken by 155 million people in the EU and candidate countries.
Textgain (Belgium) – an AI startup that enables companies and governments to derive insights from unstructured data through predictive text analytics and focus on the analysis of hate speech, an important area that has historically received limited attention.
The four startups will share a total of €1 million in prize money and 8 million GPU hours on two of the world's leading EuroHPC JU (European High Performance Computing Alliance) supercomputers, LUMI and LEONARDO. The supercomputing time gained will be critical for them to develop large AI models over the next 12 months and will allow them to reduce training time from years to weeks. After that, the winners will publish their developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use, or publish their research results.
All of these initiatives underscore the broad innovation and strategic priorities for AI development in Europe, addressing a wide range of areas from language inclusion, societal challenges, to efficiencies in different sectors.
A total of 94 proposals were received for the Mega AI Challenge, demonstrating the competitive nature of the AI sector in Europe.
In this competition, organized by the European Commission, and given the great success of the program, EuroHPC JU allocates additional computing time to the supercomputer MareNostrum 5, hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. 800,000 compute hours will be allocated to the fifth-place proposal from Multiverse Computing, a quantum computing startup focused on improving the energy efficiency and speed of large language models.
The Mega AI Grand Challenge launched in November 2023 to promote innovation and excellence in large AI models in Europe.
The Big AI Grand Challenge is a collaborative project led by the EU-funded AI-boost project, the European Commission and EuroHPC JU.
This initiative not only highlights the EU's commitment to promoting technological innovation, but also lays the groundwork for a future of cooperation in which European AI talent and resources are optimally utilized. This initiative is in line with the GenAI4EU initiative, which aims to create AI solutions that empower strategic and public sectors within the EU.
EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity established in 2018 to enable the EU and EuroHPC participating countries to coordinate their efforts and pool resources, with the goal of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.
In order to give Europe a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, EuroHPC JU has procured nine supercomputers across Europe.
Regardless of where they are located in Europe, European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can access and benefit from these EuroHPC supercomputers to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications related to European industry, science and society.
In particular, the AI and Data-Intensive Application Access Call is designed to serve small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups that need access to supercomputing resources to execute AI and data-intensive projects.
Recently reviewed through Council Regulation (EU) 2024/1732, EuroHPC JU received a new authorization to develop and operate artificial intelligence factories. These fully open AI ecosystems, centred around the EuroHPC supercomputing facility, will support the development of Europe's highly competitive and innovative AI ecosystem.