Fastweb, a leading Italian telecommunications company, today announced it will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) generative AI and machine learning services to make its LLM, natively trained in Italian, available to third parties. This builds on Fastweb’s work with AWS to help accelerate the digital transformation of Italian businesses and public sector organizations.
Fastweb is constructing a comprehensive Italian language dataset by combining public sources and licensed data from publishers and media outlets. Using this data, Fastweb has fine-tuned the Mistral 7B model using Amazon SageMaker, achieving performance improvements of 20-50% on Italian language benchmarks.
“Current AI models primarily rely on English data, a nuanced understanding of Italian culture can be harnessed by training on carefully chosen high-quality Italian datasets. This strategic initiative will help propel digital transformation for Italian organizations using technologies at the forefront of innovation,” said Walter Renna, CEO, Fastweb. “By making these models and applications available not only at a national level but also at a global level through AWS’s comprehensive portfolio of generative AI services, we’re able to more easily build and scale our own generative AI offering, bringing new innovations to market faster.”
The new models will be made available on Hugging Face, allowing customers to deploy them via Amazon SageMaker. In the future, Fastweb plans to run its model on Amazon Bedrock using Custom Model Import, so it can easily build and scale new generative AI solutions for its customers using a broad set of capabilities available on Amazon Bedrock.
“We are committed to democratizing access of generative AI technology and applications to customers all over the world. The availability of LLMs natively trained on more languages is a critical piece in realizing that mission,” said Fabio Cerone, General Manager, Telco Industry, EMEA at AWS. “Fastweb’s effort to create an Italian-language LLM and generative AI is an important step in making the transformative power of generative AI more accessible to Italian businesses and government agencies. Through this work, Fastweb will make it easier for Italian customers to use generative AI to help resolve business challenges more quickly, tackle operational hurdles, and accelerate growth via digital transformation.”
Fastweb will also be present at AWS Summit 2024 with a stand where the attendees will be able to experience solutions of Generative AI, Cloud and Security running on AWS cloud. Fastweb and Verti, an Italian insurance company, will speak together of Verti cloud migration project in the panel "The assessment process for Verti's cloud journey".
Antonio Messina, Head of Architecture & Infrastructure Verti: "Together with Fastweb, we are making a strategic transition leveraging AWS, allowing us to optimize the infrastructure, improve security aspects, be more agile in response to changes in business volume, access innovative services and enabling the use of new Generative AI solutions".