Sampo Pyysalo
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a breakthrough technology with broad social and economic effects. However, the development of leading models is currently concentrated in a few technology hubs primarily in the U.S. and China, leaving smaller languages behind and making Europe dependent on external technologies. To secure its digital sovereignty and ensure that its languages are fully represented, it is essential for Europe to have the capacity to build its own foundation models. In this talk, I will present a line of LLM work ranging from early monolingual models for Finnish to current efforts to create fully open foundation models for all European languages in the OpenEuroLLM project.
Sampo Pyysalo is one of the leads of the TurkuNLP group (https://turkunlp.org/) in the University of Turku, Finland. His work focuses on machine learning for natural language processing, with particular emphasis on scientific text mining, Finnish language technology, and large language models. He received his PhD thesis from the University of Turku and held researcher positions at the University of Tokyo, University of Manchester and University of Cambridge before returning to the University of Turku in 2019. He is currently PI in the HPLT (https://hplt-project.org/) and OpenEuroLLM (https://openeurollm.eu/) projects, where he leads efforts to train multilingual language models.
