If the budget is indeed so modest (5.5 million euros!), I would focus completely on preparing datasets and making sure all open cultural artifacts that we can find are well documented in them. That way every model, private or open, that gets trained in the future could better represent the culture and language of your country.
There is no public website to use it, be it free or paid, the dataset is not public, the code is not public (The github URL in the article returns 404 ), the claimed model intelligence is so low that is pretty much useless at 32K context and massively inferior to GPT‑4o.
As per tradition in Portugal, some people managed to get 5.5 Million to produce nothing and no one is asking questions.
You want a better idea? Just fine tune the open source Kimi 2.6 with an open source Portuguese dataset, the cost would be under a million and we would be getting something useful.
It would be really nice to know what happened to 5.5 Millions whilst not being able to even provide a functional website to use the model.
Quite cheap compared with most public spendings
Europe countries already produce very little. Let's not let the wave pass and end up in a future where Europe is continuously reliant on US and Chinese tech as usual. And their definitions of what truth is
https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/why-domain-specific-llms-wo...
Trying to force a LLM into a specific language makes you missed out on most of the world knowledge.