The artificial intelligence sector has a new participant made in Spain with the name ALIA, the first Spanish public AI. Presented this week by President Pedro Sánchez, it is positioned as an alternative to giants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but with characteristics that, as they explain, clearly distinguish it from these giant competitors.
Unlike ChatGPT, which has become synonymous with the chatbot par excellence and is already widely used by young and old, ALIA, a priori, It is much more than a simple app with which to chat or make summaries.
According to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, ALIA is a complete family of designed AI models that was born with the idea of providing much more. As an example of this, they comment on their linguistic approach. While most AI applications are in English, ALIA has been trained with 20% of data in Spanish and the rest of the co-official languages of the State.
On the other hand, it aims to put an end to the famous black boxes of AI, by allowing the population to know in depth who they are talking to and even allowing experts to review and improve the system in favor of trusted technology. This is something that does not exist with ChatGPT, for example.
The battle over AI: Can ALIA compete with giants like OpenAI?
The launch of ALIA represents a small step for Spain in the global race with a somewhat modest initial investment of less than three million euros. The truth is that ALIA faces giants like OpenAI, which have multimillion-dollar financial backing and no, there is no point of comparison.
Despite this, expectations are high. María González Veracruz, Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, has highlighted the technical complexity of the ALIA project. «The idea is to democratize AI and promote Spanish, which is the fourth most spoken language in the world and the second most used on the Internet,» he said in a recent statement.
Comment that the development of ALIA has been led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), using the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the world. Despite this, Some experts are already classifying this project as worse and more expensive than 2023 models or even the biggest smoke seller in history.
Despite all this, the Spanish Government has big plans for ALIA and an «instructed» version of the ALIA-40b model is expected to be launched in March 2025, with a first set of open instructions.
Besides, Two pilot projects have already been announced: an internal chatbot to streamline the work of the Tax Agency and a solution to improve the early diagnosis of heart failure in primary care.
Despite comparisons to ChatGPT, ALIA developers insist that their goal is not to compete directly with the OpenAI giant. «The objective is not to compete with ChatGPT, for that we would need 5 billion dollars,» explained Marta Villegas, one of the experts behind the project. Instead, ALIA is positioned as an alternative focused on specific use cases.
Could ALIA suffer the same fate as the ‘MeToca’ app?
The recent closure of the MeToca’ application promoted by the Ministry of Equality has left an important lesson about the risks of launching public technological projects without a clear strategy to attract users. After costing more than 200,000 euros and accumulating just 11,201 downloads in its first six months, the app was deactivated due to «lack of users».
Taking this as a basis: Could ALIA, the new Spanish public AI, face a similar end? It certainly doesn’t get off to a good start. and there is no doubt that if it fails to gain the trust of those who are going to use it, it will remain safely stored in the forgotten drawer and a large amount of money in the trash.
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Tags: Artificial intelligence, Spain, Software, Economy