site.btaSofia's Computer Science Institute Launches Bulgarian-Language AI Model

The Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) in Sofia has launched BgGPT, the first Bulgarian-language artificial intelligence (AI) model of the latest generation, the Education Ministry’s press centre said on Monday. BgGPT is now available at https://chat.bggpt.ai.

The GPT technology is the pinnacle of AI development, improving the way society interacts with information. Just a few days after the INSAIT Institute at Sofia University announced the creation of BgGPT in January, thousands of people and hundreds of Bulgarian public and private organizations requested access to the technology.

Two weeks ago, INSAIT made the language model available for free use. The technology is already being deployed by businesses, which report that it can be tuned to their needs within hours with very little computational and financial resources. After such fine-tuning, BgGPT’s performance is on par with the most powerful models, such as the GPT-4, even though it is way more cost-efficient in terms of hardware requirements. This feature enables Bulgarian companies and institutions to implement AI almost for free, as compared to the huge costs of fine-tuning closed AI models like those of OpenAI. This is just the first step in the development of revolutionary technology, INSAIT said.

Another advantage BgGPT has is that it can be used within a single organization only, and confidential data does not get shared with third parties. BgGPT builds on the open-source Mistral-7B through continuous pre-training and innovation implementation.

Providing public access to the BgGPT chatbot and its models is part of INSAIT's large-scale strategy for artificial intelligence development and implementation in Bulgaria. To this end, INSAIT partners with dozens of Bulgarian private and public organizations that provide public data, including the National Revenue Agency, APIS, Prosveta, and Lex.BG, among others. These partnerships involve the provision of public data for the improvement of the model and the implementation of pilot projects. BgGPT models are expected to lead to the creation of digital apps, assistants, and services in areas such as education, public administration, accounting, etc.