“A few minutes ago, we just published the first models of Alia, the foundational model of artificial intelligence (AI) in Spanish.” This was announced this morning in Madrid by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during the closing ceremony of the event. HispanIA 2040: how artificial intelligence will improve our future. “These are public and open AI models,” Sánchez stressed. You can start using it on the Alia.gob.es website.
The launch of a large language model in Spanish, Alia, also trained in Catalan, Galician, Valencian and Basque, is one of the star projects that the Executive has been working on in terms of AI. The best-known large models, such as those used by ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, have been trained in English, so they may have certain gaps when presenting results to users. Alia’s objective is precisely to attack these deficiencies: for the model to know the clichés and all the possible context of Spain.
By presenting itself as an open source tool, companies that want to do so can take it as a starting point to develop their own models. Sánchez has also announced that the Government is working on two first pilot tests: an internal chatbot for the Tax Agency that contributes to streamlining procedures and an application to improve the early diagnosis of heart failure in Primary Care.
The Government’s plans for Alia were reflected in the Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2024, the document that orders actions in this area for 2024 and 2025 and which was presented last year. The strategy dedicates 10 million euros to the model and plans to expand the linguistic corpus from which it will be nourished, reaching a minimum of four billion words. It is being fed with all types of official documents, from session diaries of the Congress of Deputies to repositories of scientific journals in Spanish. López’s predecessor at the head of Digital Transformation, José Luis Escrivá, said about Alia in an interview in Morning Express that “it will open the doors to a new generation of technological products enriched with the vast linguistic heritage of Spanish and the co-official languages of Spain.” .
The Ministry of Digital Transformation contemplates the development of models with up to 175 billion parameters, the same ones used by the first version of ChatGPT. The team led by López has worked with the Ministry of Culture to find the formula that guarantees the protection of the copyright of the texts used in this system. The goal is for the foundational model to be transparent and open, characteristics not shared by, for example, ChatGPT.
The Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2024 is endowed with 1,500 million euros, coming mainly from the recovery plan and the Addendum, it contemplates several key actions, to which are added another 600 already deployed under the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (ENIA). ) of 2020. To that number, Sánchez has announced that another 150 will be added to promote AI among companies, 20 of them aimed specifically at SMEs.
The act HispanIA 2040 has served to present a prospective work commissioned by the Government to a group of experts made up of academics and businessmen with the aim of drawing a map with which to guide us in the challenges that AI will pose for society. “AI can be a decisive tool for social progress,” Sánchez highlighted.
As highlighted by the President of the Government, the document maintains that AI can help the Spanish economy to be more efficient, it can contribute to optimizing the provision of public services, improving sustainability, reinforcing security and “fighting inequality of opportunities and income.”
The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (ENIA)
In addition to the development of Alia, the ENIA contemplates the investment of 90 million euros to update the MareNostrum 5 of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the supercomputer with the largest data storage capacity in Europe and the third in maximum performance (the other two are in Finland and Italy). This infrastructure was chosen in December by the European Commission as one of the seven AI factories in the EU.
The promotion of talent in the field of AI is another point that the strategy attacks. The Government will allocate 760 million to scholarships in AI, in the development of specific training projects around this technology, in creating new specialties for FP and in the training of Administration personnel.
The day HispanIA 2040It has had a large institutional representation: it was inaugurated by the Minister for Digital Transformation and the Public Service, Óscar López, and was attended by the Third Vice President and Minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Sara Aagesen; the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska; the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente; and the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas.
