07-05-2025

“Developing artificial intelligence in Italy while also remaining competitive is possible through an ecosystem that engages research centers, as well as through effective collaboration with hyperscalers. This within a system that values Italian talent and expertise. The launch of Velvet proves it." These were the words of Valeria Sandei, CEO of Almawave, on Class CNBC, in an interview conducted by Francesco Paolo Tarallo.

"I don’t view the European regulatory framework as a constraint in itself, but rather as a protective environment within which to shape and guide technological development. Our goal is to act precisely within this context, rooted in the culture and standards of the EU.”

With the Velvet models unveiled in January, Almawave is among the few Italian players to have created a proprietary GenAl, designed and built entirely in Italy. Velvet 14B and Velvet 2B, foundational large language models, and Instruct, were developed entirely in-house and trained on Almawave’s own architecture using the Leonardo supercomputer of CINECA.

The goal, explains Raniero Romagnoli, CTO of Almawave, "is to address real-world needs, such as simplifying human-machine interaction and supporting the decision-making process, while respecting the regulatory framework. This results in models that are suitable for a wide range of use cases, are easy to integrate into corporate systems, and are lightweight, especially in terms of energy consumption."

An intelligent AI not just with regard to its output, which is powered by 14 billion parameters and 32,000 tokens, but with regard to its very architecture, designed to be easily customizable and immediately implemented on major market platforms. From an ethical standpoint it is "open source, environmentally conscious, and mindful of compliance and systemic risks.”

"This development is the result of more than a decade of experience in language technologies, always focused on technical expertise in the field of AI, an area that, today, and increasingly in the future as well, can truly make a difference."

Looking ahead, Almawave's family of Velvet models will still be there, destined to expand to include new languages beyond the current six (Italian, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English) and moving toward multimodal capabilities.