Defense and artificial intelligence should be an absolute priority for the state, believes Stepan Mytish, head of EPAM Ukraine. At the same time, in his opinion, the emergence of a national LLM will not have an impact on the IT industry or the company in particular.
Defense and artificial intelligence should be an absolute priority for the state, believes Stepan Mytish, head of EPAM Ukraine. At the same time, in his opinion, the emergence of a national LLM will not have an impact on the IT industry or the company in particular.
In March, the Ministry of Digital Affairs announced the creation of a Ukrainian national LLM. The country's largest telecom operator, Kyivstar, will be directly involved in its development, and is ready to invest $1.5–2 million in initial investment.
"I don't think the emergence of a national LLM will have an impact on our business or industry, but at the same time, this is a trend - when each state is trying to build its own AI factory and national LLM," Mitish said in an interview with DOU.
He added that it is already a trend not only for companies, but also for states to be leaders in the field of AI.
"Therefore, I believe that this is absolutely the right story for Ukraine. Another thing is that it requires large resources," the head of EPAM Ukraine noted.
Indeed, developing a model requires considerable financial investments. For example, Bulgaria spent $100 million on developing Europe's first national LLM, while Brazil allocated $200 million for this.
Since the Ministry of Digital Affairs chose the continuous pretraining method with subsequent fine-tuning (using existing open-source models and training them on Ukrainian language corpora), the cost of the Ukrainian model may decrease significantly.
Recall that last week the Ministry of Digital Affairs announced the launch of the AI Factory project — an IT environment on the basis of which the first state AI services will operate. In order to create such an environment, it is necessary to purchase hardware and software. As the editorial staff of dev.ua found out , a corresponding announcement has already appeared on Prozorro. The procurement will be carried out by the State Enterprise "Diya".
Comment hidden for violating commenting rules.