ALIApublic infrastructure promoted by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, It already has a new model of AI. It is about OTHER 40Btrained with 40,000 million parameters and capable of interacting with an interlocutor.
The model has been aligned and trained with a set of data and instructions adapted to the sociocultural characteristics of Spain, and combines contributions from human translators and supervised synthetic generation. In this way, ALIA 40B Instructado tries to guarantee that the cultural and linguistic diversity of Spain is represented in AI developments.
The person in charge of announcing the launch of the model has been the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, María González Veracruzwithin the framework of the event Promoting the AI ecosystem, which hosted the final of the ALIA Challenge promp-a-thon. It is the first activity carried out by the Open Source AI Community launched by SEDIA.
This meeting was held within the framework of the National Green Algorithms Program, and was organized by the General Directorate of Artificial Intelligence. During its celebration, it raised a dialogue on how to develop a more responsible, efficient and sustainable AI. Also the final of the aforementioned “promp-a-thon”, in which more than 30 of the 91 registered for it participated. All have proposed AI solutions that contribute to a more responsible use of energy resources through the use of the ALIA 40B Instructed model.
The ALIA family of language models began in January with the base model 40B, on which the one just presented has been developed. Since then, the Roberta Multilingüe model has been published, which can analyze and classify information in several languages, and the SalamandraTA 7B, an automatic translation system that works with all the official and co-official languages of Spain and the EU.
The day included a demonstration space, in which several public and private entities presented initiatives in which ALIA and other models developed within the framework of the ILENIA program are already being implemented.
Attendees have been able to learn about the potential of the models to improve efficiency, accessibility and sustainability in areas such as legal, citizen service, emergency management or news verification. The six demonstrator centers offer various applications that are having a positive impact on information management, decision making and the improvement of public services.
The day also included a series of roundtable discussions in which experts in technology, ethics, sustainability and public policies analyzed the social and environmental impact of AI, with the aim of reinforcing collaboration and learning between the main actors in the Spanish ecosystem.
THE program began with the intervention of Cristian Cantón Ferrer, Associate Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). During his presentation, he highlighted the Government’s commitment to the development of the first AI Factory in Spain to democratize access to this infrastructure, strengthen its application for the benefit of the public interest and reduce linguistic and cultural gaps in the digital sphere.
The first table focused on how AI has become a strategic issue for the technological sovereignty of countries, exploring the measures that Spain can adopt to advance in this regard. In this context, special attention has been paid to the UNE standard, which establishes criteria to measure and optimize the energy consumption of algorithms.
Noelia González, Head of AI at the European University, participated in it; Senén Barro, Director of the Singular Center for Research in Intelligent Technologies (CiTIUS) of the University of Santiago de Compostela; Iraia Ibarzabal, CGO of Multiverse Computing; and Rafael Muñoz Guillena, President of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN) and Secretary General of the Digital Intelligence Center (CENID) of the University of Alicante.
At the next table, Nerea Luis, PhD in AI and Co-founder of Lumi Labs; María Grandury, Founder of Somos NLP and Researcher at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM); Carlos Riquelme, Principal Scientist at Microsoft AI; Nuria Ávalos, General Director of IndesIA; and Eduardo Ordax, GenAI Lead EMEA at Amazon Web Services; have debated the state of AI, addressing the value it is bringing to society, as well as its limitations and technical challenges.
The third and final table was dedicated to the incorporation of AI into public administration, and real cases in operation were presented. It included the participation of Enrique Ávila Gómez, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Reference Center of the Defense Staff; Javier Hernández, Deputy Director General of Promotion and Innovation of Digital Justice Services; Manuel Perera Domínguez, General Director of Digital Strategy of the Andalusian Digital Agency (ADA); and Mariví Monteserín Rodríguez, Mayor of the Avilés City Council.
The person in charge of closing the day was the General Director of IA, Aleida Alcaide, and then the names of the winners of the competition were revealed. The winners have been chosen based on the quality of the interactions with the model and the efficiency in the use of the ‘prompts’ registered on the platform.
The first prize was received by Sara Khiar Souri and Víctor Humberto Casanova Bernal; with Juan Linares Lanzman in second place; and David Durán Olivar and Emiliano Javier Castro in third. The objective of both challenges was to obtain valid and logical answers, using the least amount of computing possible in the answers, to achieve maximum energy efficiency. The goal was to get valid and logical answers, with the least amount of computing possible in the answers to achieve maximum energy efficiency.
