400B Parameter Model: Consortium "Europa" Wins AI Competition (www.heise.de)

The European Commission has announced that the consortium "Europa," led by the Italian firm Domyn, has won the "Frontier AI Grand Challenge." This victory comes with a mandate to develop a groundbreaking open-source AI model containing over 400 billion parameters, a scale typically dominated by U.S. and Chinese technologies. The initiative, aimed at enhancing the EU's technological sovereignty, underscores the region's ambition to play a significant role in the global AI landscape by leveraging its own talent and industrial capabilities. The project targets not just general AI applications, but specifically addresses the needs of regulated industries like finance, defense, and advanced manufacturing. Domyn's existing models, such as the 263 billion parameter Domyn-Large, are optimized for European languages and tailored for business-critical applications. The new model will utilize advanced architectures like “Mixture-of-Experts” to maximize performance and efficiency. Funded in part through collaboration with the EuroHPC supercomputing consortium, the model will be made freely available to all stakeholders in the EU, fostering innovation in sectors like healthcare and autonomous systems while promoting a trustworthy AI ecosystem reflective of European values.