First AI open language model for Portuguese is now available

Albertina PT is the first large generative AI model for the Portuguese language, free of charge, open source, and with universal access, and is now available. It can generate texts about any topic in the Portuguese both variants from Brazil and Portugal.

This model has been developed by researchers from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa) and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Oporto (FEUP). It has been made publicly available this May and has 900 million parameters. Albertina PT is aimed at researchers and organizations, public and private, large and small, from all economic sectors.

At the time of publication, its performance establishes the state of the art for Portuguese with respect to published and open neural language models. It is these kinds of language models that support the full range of AI applications that are all the rage, from chatbots to machine translation.

"This is a very important historical milestone in the technological preparation of the Portuguese language for the digital age", says António Branco, Professor at the Department of Informatics at Ciências ULisboa and coordinator of this project.

Further details about this work have been made available on arXiv, in the paper "Advancing Neural Encoding of Portuguese with Transformer Albertina PT-*".