Tilde has won a proposal to develop an AI solution that provides end-to-end data security and a top-quality language model

The language technology company Tilde has won funding in the international project FFplus, which aims to implement generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions by means of high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Only 18 projects out of 62 submissions throughout Europe have received funding. Tilde is going to develop a solution that will enable organisations to use AI safely and ensure the highest quality of their language models.

“The aim of the project is to implement a solution in the internal infrastructure of organisations so that all the data remain within the company and aren’t transferred to third parties. This is of the utmost importance to the public sector, legal, financial, and other organisations that deal with sensitive information. It’s also a chance to gain specific know-how: we will learn how to fine-tune large language models for minor European languages (mainly Lithuanian). This will allow us to develop more precise and higher quality AI solutions than can be offered by current English-speaking models,” – says Giedrius Karauskas, head of the technology department of Tilde.

In this project, Tilde will tackle two main challenges. Firstly – linguistic subjectivity: more than 90% of large language models are in English, therefore, lesser European languages, including Lithuanian, remain on the periphery. Secondly – safety: organisations want to leverage AI capacity without sharing internal data to external cloud service providers.

“Our solution will be a semantic search engine with a QA function, capable of answering employee queries, based on the internal documentation of their organisation, without any connection to the external network or cloud AI services. It will be possible to adapt the solution for different purposes – search of internal knowledge, automatisation of client services, text summary generation, machine translation etc.” – explains Giedrius Karauskas.

The Tilde project will cover the entire AI solution development cycle: from language model adaptation and development to performance optimisation, testing and integration with the specific infrastructure of the organisation. The work will be executed using high-performance computing resources that enable work with complex models of 30 billion parameters or more. The first results are expected by the end of the year.

Project FFplus is a European initiative to finance small and medium enterprises which take on the development of advanced generative AI solutions and use high-performance computing (HPC) resources. In this call, funding was allocated to 18 projects from 14 European states such as Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Lithuania, and others. 36 organisations were selected, the majority of which (56%) comprise small and medium enterprises.

The first open call was made in 2024 between June and September with a budget of € 4.37 million. Each project could receive funding of up to € 300,000. The call was sent to companies with experience in AI and HPC areas, to encourage technological advancement and increase their competitiveness. Project duration – 10 months.