“The intent here isn’t to build a chatbot or an AI assistant — that would be a product initiative requiring a lot of effort, and that’s what ChatGPT did so well,” Sarlin said. “What we’re contributing is an open source foundation model that functions as the AI infrastructure for companies in Europe to build upon. We know what it takes to build models, it’s not something you need billions for.”
Since 2017, Sarlin has spearheaded AI lab Silo AI, which launched — in partnership with others, including the HPLT project — the family of Poro and Viking open models. These already support a handful of European languages, but the company is now readying the next iteration “Europa” models, which will cover all European languages.