Finnish startup Silo AI has released as open source a latest Large Language Model (LLM) focused on Nordic languages, including Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. It’s evaluated that it has contributed to increasing the accessibility of the European language model by lowering access barriers based on language.
MarkTechPost reported on the seventh (local time) that Silo AI has released the enterprise LLM 'Viking' as open source, supporting various languages resembling Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, English, and several other programming languages. . Viking is free to make use of for business and research purposes under the Apache 2.0 license.
Based on this, Viking is the next-generation version of the LLM 'Poro' with 34.2 billion parameters launched by Silo AI in November last 12 months, with parameters of seven billion (Viking 7B), 13 billion (13B), and 33 billion (33B), respectively. It is obtainable in three models:
It relies on an identical architecture to 'Rama 2', including features resembling flash attention, roundabout embedding, and grouped query attention. It was trained on a 2 trillion token dataset and supports a context window of as much as 4000 tokens.
Specifically, Viking has been shown to have excellent performance when processing resource-poor languages. Despite only completing training on 100 billion tokens, initial evaluations showed that Viking outperformed other open models in English and programming languages while maintaining efficiency in those languages.
For instance, when Finns or Swedes use Viking to reply work emails or summarize scientific research, Viking is evaluated to be more efficient than 'ChatGPT' or 'Claude'.
That is a great example of ‘Sovereign AI’, which goals to guard data sovereignty by constructing its own language-based LLM for every country without being depending on global big tech.
One other characteristic of Viking is that it just isn’t a service targeting general consumers.
Silo AI is an organization that develops customized AI models for businesses. It provides over 100 enterprise AI applications based on the Viking model. Important customers include Intel, Unilever, and Allianz, in addition to European telecommunications and automobile corporations.
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com
