Italy's Domyn plans to launch a completely open-source AI model in a year, with the goal of creating one of the most sophisticated "frontier" systems on the market, according to CEO Uljan Sharka.
The action is taken as Europe looks for options to decrease dependence on AI systems hosted abroad. Italy and Czechia have limited remote access to DeepSeek's models while permitting locally hosted installations. Worries have intensified regarding U.S. export restrictions on Anthropic's models.
Domyn's EUROPA group, formed with Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft research facility, was selected for the project under the European Commission's Frontier AI Grand Challenge. The initiative places Domyn next to France's Mistral and the newcomer OVHcloud in the European AI sector.
Domyn, previously known as iGenius, was established in Milan in 2016 and has already launched a collection of specialized AI models for regulated industries like finance, government, and heavy industry.
The open-source movement arises as Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen lead the open-source scene, whereas the majority of top U.S. models are still proprietary and require remote access.
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A system with 400 billion parameters would be considered one of the largest open-source AI models ever, but mere size does not dictate its ability to compete with top-tier frontier systems.
Sharka mentioned that the model will be entirely open-source and reproducible, enabling businesses and governments to operate it on their own systems without any charge.
OVHcloud's CEO Octave Klaba informed Reuters at VivaTech last week that decreasing expenses and technical obstacles were creating a "second wave" of AI model developers.
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"I completely concur with that," Sharka remarked, noting that the Commission's assistance provides access to EuroHPC, Europe's public supercomputing framework, which Sharka labeled as an undervalued strategic resource.
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Sharka pointed out that although U.S. firms are investing significantly in AI infrastructure, Europe possesses the necessary resources via the EuroHPC network, contending that training a frontier model demands much less computational power than providing service to hundreds of millions of chatbot users from afar.