During the Mobile World Congress, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced an ambitious project. The government is developing an advanced artificial intelligence language model fully trained in Spanish and the co-official languages of Spain.
A Spanish ChatGPT
In his speech at the opening of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sánchez emphasised the importance of an in-depth reflection on the impact of technology. He mainly referred to chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLM), rights and freedoms, the labour market and the design of public policy. He stated that Spain wants to play a leading role on the international stage in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). This Spanish language model promises to provide an open and transparent infrastructure, trained in Spanish and its co-official languages.
Public-private cooperation
To realise this project, the Spanish Government will collaborate with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the Spanish Supercomputing Network, the Spanish Royal Academy of the Language and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The initiative also aims to expand to Ibero-American countries.
Why is a Spanish-speaking chatbot important?
The effectiveness of an AI model depends heavily on the completeness of its corpus. This refers to the large amount of text data on which the model is trained. With a predominantly English-language data set in many current systems, it is difficult for AI to perform well in other languages. Therefore, the Spanish initiative aims to provide an open, public and accessible language infrastructure for companies. This gives them access to a large-scale language model trained in Spanish and co-official languages. Furthermore, this will enable them to develop and economically exploit advanced language technologies, such as intelligent assistants and conversation systems.
A humanistic vision
Sánchez emphasised the goal of promoting a dynamic economy. Furthermore, it must be open to the future, offer fair opportunities to companies and generate more and better jobs. At the same time, it is essential to find a balance between actively promoting technology full of opportunities and a necessary humanistic vision to avoid prejudices and biases.
Financial challenges
Concrete figures have not yet been revealed. Nevertheless, the development and maintenance of such AI models are known to require significant investments. Spain and Microsoft recently signed a historic $2.1 billion investment to advance “responsible AI.” This gives an indication of the financial commitment to this project.
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