cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10312423
Domyn - an Italian company specialized in researching and developing responsible artificial intelligence (AI) for regulated industries, including financial services, government and heavy industry - plans to release a fully open-source AI model within a year, aiming for one of the most advanced “frontier” systems available. CEO Uljan Sharka laid out the timeline on Thursday. The push is part of Europe’s drive to lean less on foreign-hosted AI.
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- Domyn’s model will carry more than 400 billion parameters, be trained from scratch, and ship as open source so companies and governments can run it on their own hardware at no cost.
- The work runs through the EUROPA consortium, built with Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and chosen under the European Commission’s Frontier AI Grand Challenge.
- Domyn, formerly iGenius, was founded in Milan in 2016 and is backed by Abu Dhabi’s G42, with investors including Eurizon Capital, Rabobank, and BNY.
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The EUROPA project places Domyn next to France’s Mistral and recent entrant OVHcloud on the European map.
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The model will be open and reproducible, with weights that third parties can download, run, and verify. A 400-billion-parameter system would rank among the largest open-source models yet, though scale alone does not decide whether it matches the best frontier systems.
Domyn already sells specialized models for regulated fields such as finance, government, and heavy industry. Its open release lands as Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen lead the open-source field, while most top US models stay proprietary and accessed remotely.
Sharka said the company plans to gather data from institutional partners. He has meetings lined up with European heads of state and expects the first data agreements with governments within weeks. Domyn declined to share funding figures.
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The plan slots into a larger European effort to own its AI stack rather than rent it. The bloc’s flagship challenge to fund one sovereign open model calls for a system that works across all 24 official EU languages, a design built for European institutions from the start rather than bolted on later. That ambition gained urgency after European officials protested being locked out of American frontier systems on national-security grounds, which turned a planning worry into a live one for buyers in finance, government, and healthcare.
The economics now make a homegrown answer plausible. Falling training costs are opening that second wave of builders, and open-weight releases carry privacy and sovereignty advantages that hosted services cannot match. Europe already leans on Mistral’s open-weight models for local options, while the wider open-source race is shaped by Chinese labs whose models can be self-hosted to keep data in-house and whose aggressive pricing keeps pressure on every rival. Whether Domyn can ship a frontier-grade model in twelve months is the open question, and the answer will say a lot about how far Europe has closed the gap.
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