NEWSFLASHES

On Aug. 6, 2024, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) signed a long-term cooperation agreement with Seedbox Ventures GmbH, a Stuttgart-based artificial intelligence (AI) consultancy. The cooperation is aimed at supporting Germany’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through developing AI solutions tailored to their needs. The collaboration represents an important step towards a strategic alignment and operationalization of AI in Europe, and holds the potential to contribute significantly to the growth of a globally competitive, innovative European AI ecosystem.

In addition, Seedbox will use HLRS’s Hawk supercomputer and the center’s future high-performance computing (HPC) systems to train specialized, powerful, multilingual language models of various sizes. They will also make these language models available to the larger AI community on an open source basis. The resulting knowledge should demonstrate how domain-specific AI models can be set up, operated, and scaled on local HPC environments in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.

Among other goals, the collaboration between Seedbox and HLRS aims to enable German industry to utilize the full potential of large language models. Dennis Hoppe, head of the HLRS Department of Converged Computing, welcomed the new partnership with Seedbox, saying, “In recent years, HLRS has been continually expanding its ability to support machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through our collaboration with Seedbox, we look forward to gaining valuable experience with LLMs and generative AI, particularly as the partnership will also contribute to HLRS’s mission of sustainably supporting German industry.”

For more information, please read the full press release on the HLRS website.