The EU also plans to expand startup access to its supercomputing hardware, with the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) providing the allocation of eight million GPU hours to the winners. A fifth startup, Multiverse Computing, will be allocated 800,000 computational hours on another supercomputer. The EU has recognized the need to upgrade the supercomputers and improve accessibility for AI startups.
Key takeaways:
- The European Union has announced the winners of a “Large AI Grand Challenge” aimed at accelerating the pace of homegrown innovation by large-scale AI model makers. The four winning startups are Lingua Custodia, Textgain, Tilde, and Unbabel.
- The winners will share €1 million in prize money and eight million GPU hours to train their models on the bloc’s high performance computing (HPC) supercomputers over the next 12 months.
- The EU expects all the winners to release their developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use or publish their research findings at the end of the training period.
- The EU unveiled a plan to expand startup access to the bloc’s supercomputing hardware. The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) currently has eight operational supercomputers, two of which will be providing the allocation of eight million GPU hours to the four winners.