Kyivstar will be directly involved in the creation of the Ukrainian national LLM, plans for which were announced by the Ministry of Digital Affairs in March.
Kyivstar will be directly involved in the creation of the Ukrainian national LLM, plans for which were announced by the Ministry of Digital Affairs in March.
This was announced today during the signing of a relevant memorandum between the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Kyivstar, which was attended by the Head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, and the CEO of the telecom operator, Oleksandr Komarov, reports a dev.ua correspondent.
«It seems to me that any country should have its own national large language model. Because it is a budget reduction, national security, local content, and the ability to provide all state bodies with its services free of charge,» said Komarov, giving arguments in favor of creating a national LLM.
He also noted that for Kyivstar, this project is an investment in the company’s own AI competence.
«Within the framework of this project, we want to make a qualitative leap as a company and be one of the leaders in the implementation of artificial intelligence in Ukraine,» added Komarov.
During his speech, the head of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Mykhailo Fedorov, outlined that, according to plans, the creation of a national LLM will take about nine months.
«We need a partner here, because as a state we must understand our strengths and weaknesses. Kyivstar in this project will be our technical partner and financial partner, which will help us build and train this LLM model,» he noted.
According to Fedorov, several «committees» will participate in the creation of the national language model — a «strategic committee», which will consist of representatives of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Kyivstar and IT companies, a «technical committee», as well as an «ethical committee», which will analyze what data this LLM model is trained on.
Fedorov clarified that Kyivstar will directly develop LLM and the technical part, and after its creation it will be available under the open source model.
As for investments in the project, a somewhat abstract figure was mentioned during the event — «millions of dollars of investment», but Kyivstar Digital Product Development Director, CPO Kyivstar.Tech Mykhailo Nestor emphasized that it is difficult to specify it more specifically, because this is a «science-intensive R&D project, and no one has ever made a sovereign LLM model in the Ukrainian language.»
At the same time, as for the team, in his words, «the technical team needs to be relatively small,» and it could be 10-15 people, not hundreds of people.
Nevertheless, both Kyivstar and the Ministry of Digital Affairs allowed the further involvement of other commercial players in the project, but not at the development stage, for which Kyivstar will be directly responsible, but somewhat later.
Recall that previously dev.ua wrote that the national LLM will be trained on Ukrainian data, will understand the national context, dialects, and terms, and on the basis of the national LLM, AI products for the state and the defense sector will be launched .
It was reported that the development of a national model requires significant resources and deep technical knowledge, so the Ministry of Digital Affairs is already establishing partnerships with leading Ukrainian IT companies and research centers.
