Lisbon, July 1, 2026 (Lusa) - The chief executive (CEO) of the Centre for Responsible AI said in an interview with Lusa that the Portuguese artificial intelligence (AI) model, Amália, enables three levels of sovereignty: linguistic, cultural, and data sovereignty.

Amália, a large language model (LLM), debuts this afternoon at the Técnico Innovation Centre in Lisbon.

When asked what Amália is for, Paulo Dimas cites three reasons, “and all of them relate to sovereignty”.

“The first is linguistic sovereignty. The second is the sovereignty of our culture, our principles and, if you like, to use the Pope’s word, our morality,” explains the CEO of the Centre for Responsible AI.

“We have our own morality; we have certain principles. We want Amália to help people share accurate information, such as the benefits of vaccines,” unlike what can happen with other LLMs. In other words, “we want to retain control over our morality and our culture,” he said, noting that “the third form of sovereignty is data sovereignty”.

“When we’re dealing with data from Portuguese citizens, we prefer to keep that data within our own infrastructure rather than sending it to the ‘clouds’ of the big American tech companies,” hence the importance of data sovereignty, he noted.

In short, this “is what Amália is: it allows us to have sovereignty over the Portuguese spoken in Portugal, it allows us to have sovereignty over our culture, and it allows us to have sovereignty over our data”.

Now, “Amália is not a ChatGPT […], it is very important that people realise this”, emphasises Paulo Dimas.

Not least because ChatGPT is something that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and “is not on a national scale”, but rather on the scale of major tech companies.

This “means that we cannot go to Amália and carry out the same tasks we do on ChatGPT”, but it is possible to carry out others. “For example, we can help teachers plan their lessons by producing summaries in European Portuguese in a controlled manner” or “provide citizen services” through ARTE – the Agency for State Technological Reform – “which keeps our data within Portuguese borders”, continues Paulo Dimas.

“These are cases where Amália can be applied and is being applied”, he said, pointing out that the Portuguese LLM “focuses on applications within its scale and capabilities, [...] it is not expected to win the gold medal at the Maths Olympiad, nor is it designed to enable the discovery of the next paradigm in artificial intelligence”, tasks “that are only possible with large-scale models”.

Therefore, “it is important to realise that Amália works for a series of tasks – currently limited – and not for others, because it is also a question of investment, benefit and return,” he added.

Regarding his role in Amália, Paulo Dimas emphasised: “I was one of those people – the person who brings partners together”. In other words, “I, along with the Centre for Responsible AI, organised a workshop dedicated to language technologies, chaired by André Martins [one of Amália’s leading researchers], and we felt it would make sense to bring together the best research being carried out in this area, namely Large Language Models”, he explained.

Also present at that workshop were João Magalhães (also a researcher at Amália), Francisco Santos, from the Foundation for Science and Technology, and Vanda França, who is leading ARTE’s centre of excellence for AI.

“We all began to realise” that Portugal needed an LLM, and from there the discussion moved on to the importance of sovereignty in AI and raising political awareness.

The project “received very significant support” from the prime minister, whose initiative was announced at the Web Summit in a speech “that fired people’s enthusiasm”, he recalled, noting that it takes courage to make things happen.

The Amália project began 18 months ago “and will meet the deadline that had been set” because, in fact, “the teams working on Amália have had this sense of mission and the feeling that they are creating something that is, in fact, important for the country”, Paulo Dimas told Lusa.

Meanwhile, “this initial consortium of two centres has been expanded to include three further research centres […] and we now have five research centres”, he said.

“These three additional centres have been working over the past 18 months in the fields of education, science and the media, and are therefore involved in specific Amália projects in these three areas”, Paulo Dimas concluded.

ALU/ADB // ADB.

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