LLM Booster for Regional Innovation and Digital Growth in Europe

ongoing

In today's rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape, foundation models are becoming the cornerstone of many recent generative AI applications, driving advancements across numerous sectors and industries. To reap the economic potential of productivity growth from generative AI, to foster a more open and competitive market, create better choices for European companies and citizens, reduce the risks of strategic dependency on non-EU actors and to ensure that our European culture, values and languages are embedded in generative AI systems, Europe must build a strong position in generative AI by stimulating the development of foundation models by European entities. The recent Draghi report suggests to (1) identify priority AI vertical applications for the EU, encouraging EU companies to participate in their development and deployment in key industrial sectors and (2) increase the computational capacity dedicated to the training and fine-tuning of AI models and create an EU-wide framework for providing ‘computing capital’ to innovative SMEs in the EU, by leveraging both public and private resources. The creation of a strong European position in Generative AI to ensure European digital sovereignty requires the capacity of building European GenAI industry players with global impact. These players will need to create, attract and retain talent, access to data and computing resources at scale, as well as necessary investments to advance GenAI R&D activities. This proposal aims to contribute to overcome those strictures by building on ALT-EDIC cross-Member State orchestration and strategic guidance capacities, as well as on the skills, knowledge, infrastructures and assets of its partners. It will prepare and operationalise two of the three strategic objectives listed above ‒ the pan-EU GenAI/Language Technology (LT) ecosystem and the catalyst/stage-gated challenge ‒ by exploiting and factoring in resources and assets made available by other initiatives.