Malcolm Byrne (Wicklow-Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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860. To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if the Government has had any discussions regarding the development of a sovereign artificial intelligence system; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40783/25]

Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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The National AI Strategy Refresh 2024 outlines several strategic actions that reflect the Government’s commitment to our national AI capabilities and to position Ireland as a leader in AI adoption and governance, including:

establishing an AI regulatory sandbox to foster innovation in AI;

creating a National AI Research Nexus with a unified identity; and

commissioning a landmark study on the potential impacts of AI (including generative AI) and other advanced technologies on key sectors of the Irish economy expanding the range of digital upskilling and reskilling initiatives.

As part of implementation of the Strategy, consideration is being given to how to further support the development of EU large language models and language technologies. In February 2024 Ireland was one of the ten founding members of the Alliance for Language Technologies European Digital Innovation Consortium (‘ALT-EDIC’). ALT-EDIC now includes seventeen EU Members States, one Region, and eight observing Member States.

The role of ALT-EDIC is to create a common European data infrastructure and services for language technologies in order to strengthen Europe's technological competitiveness while supporting its cultural diversity. ALT-EDIC's primary action involves collecting and federating language and multimodal data from across the European Union and its Member States. The consolidation of this language data will enable ALT-EDIC to foster the development of innovative large language models with robust multilingual and multimodal capabilities. Current projects include the LLMs4EU project in which TG4 and the ADAPT Research Centre are involved as partners in a work stream aimed at developing an LLM for public services.

In the Irish context, Údarás na Gaeltachta is undertaking a consultation and mapping exercise across the civil and public service to identify ongoing work in this area. This aims to identify further corpora and language resources, such as the video, text and sound archive of TG4, RTÉ and broadcast archive of RTÉ RnaG. This collaboration could culminate in shared corpora becoming the cornerstone of generative AI enabled Irish language and large language models fine-tuned to reflect the Irish experience.

Ireland’s priority is to work with partners in other European Union Member States to address any sovereignty concerns at the level of the Single Market through deployment of and access to pooled EU resources.