Hungarian gov teams up with Eastern European bank to develop AI supercomputer

In what may be a first, an Eastern European bank is teaming up with the government of Hungary to field an AI supercomputer that will be used to create a large language model of the Hungarian language. OTP Bank, which was founded in Hungary and operates banks across the region, worked out an agreement under which the government provides about half the funding for the supercomputer developed under contract with SambaNova Systems. The government will have access to the system for public and academic research, said Péter Csányi, deputy CEO and head of the digital division at OTP. The contract with SambaNova Systems capitalizes on the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for generating large language models that SambaNova announced in October, branding it as dataflow-as-a-service. "Building a system like this to run a GPT model is not something any bank has done before," said Marshall Choy, VP of product at SambaNova.