The Ministry of Education will co-fund the building of a large AI language model

On 7 March 2025, a press conference on the launch of the “OpenEuroLLM”, a project focused on the creation of open large-scale language models, was held at Charles University with the participation of Radka Wildová, Chief Director of the Section of Higher Education, Science and Research.

Pic1_Director General Radka Wildová at the press conference on OpenEuroLLM

The OpenEuroLLM project brings together twenty leading European research institutions, companies and high-performance computing centres and is led by Jan Hajič from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. Its purpose is to create an open large language model, including fully accessible data, covering more than 32 languages from European and associated countries and from countries with which Europe has trade relations, in order to comply with European regulations. The language model will find applications in further research and especially in the commercial sphere or in the public administrations of European countries.

“European companies need open access to high quality AI technologies to be able to compete in the global market. The OpenEuroLLM project and the use of open language models will help companies to increase their global competitiveness while contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty. For public institutions, an open language model will allow them to deliver public services efficiently. High-performance multilingual models will preserve linguistic and cultural diversity,” underlined Jan Hajič, the project’s main coordinator, on the occasion of the launch meeting.

Pic2_OpenEuroLLM logo

Thanks to its long-standing support for research on language tools, the Czech Republic is well placed to become a leader in this field. A large research infrastructure, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, is funded through dedicated support from the Ministry of Education and Science to ensure the development of digital language tools and the development of digital language collections for researchers. It is both the Czech node of the pan-European infrastructure CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure) and the node for the European digital infrastructure consortium ALT-EDIC (Alliance for Language Technologies), which the Czech Republic joined in May 2024. The cooperation with ALT-EDIC leads to the Czech Republic’s participation in several Digital Europe projects, to which OpenEuroLLM belongs.

“On behalf of the Ministry of Education, I would like to congratulate Charles University on its unprecedented success. It is not often that a Czech institution coordinates such a large international project. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports has long supported research in the field of advanced technologies and is ready to provide a national share of project co-financing,” said the Director General of the Higher Education, Science and Research Section, Radka Wildová. She also added that similar projects that succeed in the international competition not only prove the quality of Czech science, but also bring more funds to the Czech scientific environment thanks to the resources of the European Union.