Tilde has successfully trained TildeOpen
Back in the beginning of 2024, TILDE was one of the winners of the LARGE AI GRAND CHALLENGE, a competition that awarded each of its winners €250k in prize money and exclusive access to Europe’s top tier supercomputers to train their AI model.
In September 2025, TILDE announced the release of TildeOpen, a 30-billion-parameter open-source model built for Europe’s languages, now available on Hugging Face.
A coordinated European effort led by AI-BOOST
TildeOpen was made possible through a coordinated European initiative led by the AI-BOOST project. In collaboration with the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking with strategic backing from the European Commission, AI-BOOST organised the Large AI Grand Challenge to identify and accelerate Europe’s most promising AI companies. Tilde received €250k and 2 million GPU hours on the LUMI supercomputer in Finland. This unprecedented computing power enabled the development of a large-scale multilingual model in just over a year.
"This milestone shows how the AI-BOOST Large AI Grand Challenge is not just a competition but a catalyst for real-world innovation, enabling European researchers and companies to deliver AI breakthroughs that strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty. Without the GPU hours awarded under AI BOOST, this achievement would not have been possible."
Addressing Europe’s linguistic diversity
TildeOpen provides comprehensive multilingual coverage across 34 European languages — including official EU languages as well as Norwegian, Icelandic, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Balkan languages, directly addressing the under-representation of many European languages in global, English-centric models.
Early benchmarks show substantial efficiency gains: 41% in Latvian compared to LLaMA-3, 37% in Lithuanian, 31% in Finnish, 28% in Estonian, and 28% in Polish, where it also outperforms GPT-4o and Mistral. These results make the model not only more accurate, but also smaller, faster, and significantly more sustainable in real-world use.
Open source for Europe’s AI ecosystem
By releasing TildeOpen as open source on Hugging Face, Tilde ensures that researchers, start-ups, public administrations, and businesses across Europe can build on this foundation. The model can be fine-tuned for sector-specific needs — from healthcare and education to media and government services — fuelling innovation while reflecting European values, data protection standards, and regulatory requirements.
"For Europe to be truly sovereign in AI, we cannot depend on English-centric models built outside our borders. TildeOpen proves that Europe can create its own multilingual foundational models — secure, open, and aligned with European values. Crucially, this open-source release was only possible thanks to the AI-BOOST Large AI Grand Challenge, which gave us access to the EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer and enabled our team to create a resource for the whole European AI ecosystem."
About Tilde
Tilde is a leading European language technology company specializing in AI-driven translation and natural language processing solutions. Founded in Latvia, Tilde has been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge language technologies for Europe’s multilingual society for more than two decades.
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