AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

In December 2024, the Portuguese government announced AMÁLIA: a 5.5 Million Euro investment on a large-scale LLM for European Portuguese1. The other day, while building an overview of the different Portuguese NLP efforts, I stumbled upon the technical report! I couldn't believe my eyes. Much to talk about! Let's get straight to it! Actually, before we do. A quick disclaimer: AMÁLIA is an impressive piece of work. And the researchers should be very proud. But when the investment from the state is this significant, the entire country is the recipient of the work - and so I think it's only fair to ask some hard questions. If you participated on the project and are reading this: Thank you for your work! Alright - now let's get to it. AMÁLIA in a nutshell AMÁLIA is "a fully open source Large Language Model (LLM) for European Portuguese". The goal is simple: to create an LLM that treats European Portuguese as a first-class citizen. Italy, for example - did something similar with Minerva.…