A country of just over 10 million people now has a large language model that speaks its own version of the language. Portugal has released Amália, its first national AI model built specifically for European Portuguese, and it has done so in about the most deliberate way a government can.
The model, its training data and its source code are all open, free for governments, universities and companies to take and build on.
The name is not incidental. Amália is an acronym, for Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with Artificial Intelligence, but it also reaches for Amália Rodrigues, the fado singer whose voice is bound up with Portuguese identity.
The model itself is built on EuroLLM-9B, a European foundation model, which a team of more than 60 researchers and students expanded with European Portuguese datasets, a larger context window, stronger safety and evaluation systems, and the ability to handle images alongside text.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!What Amália is not is a rival to ChatGPT in the way most people would encounter one. It will not ship as a consumer chat app. It is designed instead to sit underneath other things, as the layer that other software calls on.
