AI model Amália wants to put European Portuguese at the centre

Manuel Dias spoke at the presentation of Amália, the great portuguese language model (LLM), which was presented this afternoon at the Technical Innovation Center in Lisbon.

Amália “was the first large-scale model focused on European Portuguese,” stressed the president of the State Technological Reform Agency (ARTE).

“Created in Portugal” and “with national talent”, Amália has four strategic pillars: “the promotion of language, culture, Portuguese history as no other model does, the promotion of research and innovation in artificial intelligence [IA] in Portugal, in an era in which artificial intelligence is part of our lives”, he continued.

This is “also the subject of digital sovereignty”, (...) it is very important not only to have control over our data, but to have control over the models that process our data,” Manuel Dias said.

The CTO also explained how Amália works.

First, “it’s a trained model focusing on European Portuguese. This is very, very important for European Portuguese, it was based on EuroLLM and therefore even understands other languages in Europe, but it is focused and optimized for European Portuguese”, he explained.

Then it is “a model with 9 billion parameters, it is a multimodal model and this is a very important point”, he said.

Amália “was born as a model that can analyze, perceive and generate text, but in the current version manages to analyze image, can understand speech and, therefore, imagine the amount of scenarios we can create”.

This is a model that “has a safety filter and that part is very important when we talk about creating artificial intelligence applications,” he said.

Therefore, “there is already this part also in training and it is obviously a model that results from almost two years of work of many researchers, more than 60 researchers, five Portuguese universities”, that is, “many national talent made in the development of Amália”.

But “Amália was not born to stay in the laboratory,” he said. The AI model is “ready to be used by the entire national ecosystem, not only by academia, universities, public services, multiple public administration entities and, above all, citizens”.

It is a fully open-source model, “which means that any company, any startup, can take the model, adapt it, customize it to a given domain”.

In this sense, “this is more a differentiator in the way the development of Amália was done”, he concluded.