(Alliance News) - Almawave Spa announced Monday that it has signed an agreement with Cineca, the Interuniversity Consortium hosting entity for the Ministry of Research of the Leonardo supercomputer in the EuroHPC network, for the development of "Velvet," an Italian, Open Source, multilingual, multimodal Artificial Intelligence model.

"The goal," the statement reads, "is to realize a large foundational language model, i.e., technologically underpinning other models developed later, called Velvet.

The model will operate, first and foremost, with a focus on Italian language and content and will be developed in a multilingual key, providing for the main European idioms. Brazilian Portuguese and Swahili will also be implemented, in light of Almawave's important experiences in the LATAM area and the African continent, contexts in which the company intends to evolve further.

All with the goal of fostering Velvet's widespread adoption at the international level as well.

Velvet, in its first version, will be released in the last quarter 2024 and made available on Open Source software sharing platforms, thus enabling its use on dedicated infrastructures as well.

Valeria Sandei, Almawave CEO, commented, "This partnership looks far ahead and will lead us to the realization of highly strategic AI technologies, whose impact and benefit will be able to benefit many sectors we are widely known, such as public administration, transportation, healthcare, tourism, green transition, and finance, in which we have already realized hundreds of artificial intelligence projects, with our technology. This is just the beginning of an exciting new phase in our evolution, and tackling it with Cineca makes us proud."

Almawave's stock trades in the green by 1.1 percent at EUR4.55 per share.

By Chiara Bruschi, Alliance News reporter

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