Spain will create foundational AI model in local languages

Spain plans to build a foundational AI large language model trained in Spanish and in the country’s co-official languages, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced on the eve of the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

The Spanish LLM will be transparent and open source, he said.

While some AI models are trained on texts in multiple languages, more advanced AI features from US-based tech companies are often initially only available in English. That’s the case with Google Gemini, for example, which supports more than 40 languages but offers advanced features only in English.

Making the Spanish language model widely available could help Spanish and non-Spanish enterprises alike to develop new digital services.

Sánchez stressed the importance of reflecting deeply on the impact of generative AI technology on rights and freedoms, the labor market, or the design of public policies. Spain will play a relevant role in the development of the technology internationally and will promote its use in industry and in scientific research, he said.

For the development of the Spanish large language model, the administration has established a public-private collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Spanish Supercomputing Network, the Spanish Academy of Language (RAE) and the Association of Spanish Language Academies. The administration also plans to extend the initiative to Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas.

The government points out that the percentage of language resources in English reaches as high as 90 per cent in many of the current systems. In this way, the initiative “seeks to provide an open, public, and accessible language infrastructure for companies, so that they can have a large-scale language model that facilitates services that allow them to develop advanced applications for their economic exploitation, such as intelligent assistants, conversational and dialogue systems or content generation models”.

During his speech, Sánchez also highlighted the capacity of Barcelona and the surrounding Catalonia region to attract talent, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. “Barcelona and Spain embrace digital transformation as a unique opportunity,” he said.