Minerva it is not the first artificial intelligence project trained entirely in Italian. Keeps company with Sibylla of the University of Pisa. In any case, the AI model born from the union of forces between La Sapienza university, Cineca and Nvidia, aims to exploit the power of the Leonardo supercomputer. The project has Roberto Navigli at the helm, and is at the forefront of Natural Language Processing multimodal.
Minerva, the completely Italian AI is reality
The idea of Minerva was born from a collaboration between internationally renowned experts with the aim of fully exploiting the resources of the Leonardo supercomputer to advance the research and application of AI. The vision behind it is bold and fits into a broader strategy, aiming to position itself not only in the Italian AI ecosystem but also to compare itself with similar developments in other European nations. France, for example, follows a different approach, mainly financing private entities such as Mistral, which has developed highly scalable models. It is worth mentioning that theItaly is leading the regulation of AI together with Germany and France.
The quality characteristics
Minerva shows up in three models like Claude from Anthropic: a smaller one with 350 million parameters, an intermediate one with one billion and a large model still in training with 3 billion parameters. This scalability shows a commitment to creating flexible solutions for different needs, although the numbers are lower than other large international models.
In addition to their computational power, Minerva models have been trained using a large dataset that includes 500 billion words coming from Italian sources. This represents an impressive reservoir of knowledge, equivalent to approximately 5 million novels, making the Italian AI model a significant reference in our country's AI.
In terms of accessibility, Italian AI models were initially made available to the scientific community through, with future plans to extend theaccess to a wider audience through a chatbot. This aligns with the national strategy for artificial intelligence which aims to consolidate research and attract talent, further developing AI skills in the country.
One of Minerva's main goals is to stimulate the adoption of AI in Italian small and medium enterprises and support the development of startups in the sector. Furthermore, the project aims to to influence positively la public administration, implementing artificial intelligence systems that can improve the efficiency of bureaucratic processes.
