In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed regarding Latvian support in the building of Ukraine’s national artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem. This is an important step towards a sophisticated and sovereign artificial intelligence environment in Ukraine that is in line with European values. Ukraine is considering the large language model TildeOpen, created by the Latvian company Tilde, as the foundation of this environment.
The Memorandum was signed by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Tilde, Latvian National Centre of Artificial Intelligence and the Bureau for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of the Government of Ukraine. Baiba Braze, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, also took part in the signing in Kyiv, thus demonstrating Latvia’s strong political support for the digital development of Ukraine and its transition towards the European Union.
An important step for the whole of Europe
Tilde CEO Arturs Vasilevskis remarks that cooperation with Ukraine is a significant step for all Europe: “Ukraine has defined in no uncertain terms that it requires safe and reliable artificial intelligence. TildeOpen has been created in Europe for European languages, and allows countries to build solutions without losing data sovereignty. We are proud to be a part of this process and support the integration of Ukraine into the European digital space.”
This cooperation covers support for the creation of a Ukrainian state management AI ecosystem — knowledge sharing regarding language technology and large language models, co-development and experience exchange regarding the use of EuroHPC supercomputers and building practical AI solutions for both the public and private sectors.
A model custom-built for Ukraine’s needs
TildeOpen is an open source large language model made in Latvia, which supports the creation of varied AI services. It has been built with special focus on European languages and culture, and is also suitable for Ukrainian. Training data for this tool have been selected with great care to reduce the impact of Russian propaganda and disinformation. TildeOpen is an open and transparent tool, and can be deployed on-site using Ukrainian infrastructure, allowing complete control over sensitive data. This is crucial for a country that faces security threats on a daily basis. It is the careful data selection and Euro-centric architecture that has helped TildeOpen to achieve particularly high performance, which outcompetes US-built AI models in many aspects. Due to these advantages, Ukraine is considering using TildeOpen as one of the central solutions for its future national AI initiatives to gradually build secure, reliable digital tools that are in line with European values for both public sector and business needs.
Tilde has already developed a new AI translation platform that has been handed over to Ukrainian institutions and will help translate more than 30 thousand EU legal acts. This tool supports Ukraine in its path towards the EU, facilitating the translation of legislation and unification with EU acquis. Tilde has customised its state of the art AI-driven translation platform for use with Ukrainian legal and administrative texts, with a particular focus on the automation of time-consuming tasks and improving quality.
