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The launch of DeepSeek in February sparked discussions about Europe's position in the AI race. While touted for its competitive pricing and efficiency, the LLMs open-source nature and data storage in China has also raised serious security concerns, with Italy banning its use and others restricting its use by government agencies and contractors.Enter OpenEuroLLM projectFebruary also saw the launch of the OpenEuroLLM project, which aims to improve Europe's competitiveness and digital sovereignty while lowering thresholds for European AI product development and refinement.It's timely, as many people have wondered what companies in Europe could compete with DeepSeek. Mistral AI (France) and Aleph Alpha (Germany) were most often mentioned. However, the latter has shifted from foundational LLMs to providing AI infrastructure and platforms for enterprise and government clients.Both companies are members of OpenEuropeLLM, a consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland). OpenEuropeLLM is building a family of performant, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial and public services.Significantly, the models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values and cooperation with open-source and open-science communities to ensure the models, software, data, and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs.However, there's another argument about Europe's standing in the AI race. Can we foster innovation and close the AI innovation gap by investing in smaller, specialised AI models and applications?SLMs are another way forwardAnita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO of EU-funded Iris.ai, argues that Europe's AI future depends on embracing smaller, domain-specific models (SLMs) and open-source collaboration.With Europe's data centre power demand set to triple by 2030, it's compelling to envision a different approach to AI — one that doesn't rely on ever-larger models consuming vast energy resources.I spoke to Abildgaard, and Iris.ai CTO and co-founder Victor Botev to learn more.Abildgaard contends:"While there's been some movement—like the €200 billion InvestAI plan, Open Euro LLM, and other initiatives—it still doesn't amount to a major push

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a household word, thanks to the popularity of large language models like ChatGPT. These large models are trained on the whole internet and often have hundreds of billions of parameters — settings inside the model that help it guess what word comes next in a sequence. The more parameters, the [] The post AI Explained: What’s a Small Language Model and How Can Business Use It? appeared first on PYMNTS.com.