Amália becomes the first open LLM for European Portuguese
Portugal has launched Amália, an open language model built for European Portuguese. It gives public bodies, companies and researchers a technological base they can adapt and audit.
Summary
Portugal has unveiled Amália, the first open large language model developed specifically for European Portuguese. Rather than operating as a new consumer chatbot, it was designed as a technological foundation on which public bodies, companies, universities and research centres can build their own applications.
The project brought together more than 60 Portuguese researchers. Its initial development received €5.5 million from Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan, with a further €1.5 million planned through 2027 to continue developing the model and its supporting infrastructure.
In practice
Amália has 9 billion parameters and was trained and tuned with data focused on the Portuguese language and context, including 5.8 billion tokens from Arquivo.pt. The model, data and code are being made openly available, allowing organisations to inspect how it works, adapt it to specific fields and run it on their own infrastructure.
This matters for public services, education, science and companies handling sensitive information or requiring greater control over the systems they use. It also offers an alternative for tasks where general-purpose models tend to answer in Brazilian Portuguese even when instructed to use European Portuguese.
What we still don't know
Results published by the team show strong performance on Portuguese language and culture tests compared with other fully open models of a similar size. However, part of the evaluation relied on other AI models as automatic judges, while performance in real applications will depend on implementation, data and human oversight.
Opening access to the technology does not by itself solve operating costs, continuous updates, security or quality in specialised settings. Those will be the decisive tests of Amália's practical value.
Why it matters
- It gives European Portuguese a dedicated place in an ecosystem dominated by languages and variants with more training data.
- Organisations can audit, adapt and host the model without relying solely on closed commercial platforms.
- It provides shared infrastructure for public, academic and business applications developed in Portugal.
- The project's value will be measured by the services built on top of it, not only by laboratory results.