Core Insights - VEON Ltd. announces the development of Ukraine's national large language model (LLM) in collaboration with Kyivstar and the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence, utilizing Google Gemma as the foundational model [1][2][3] Group 1: Project Overview - The Ukrainian LLM aims to encompass various Ukrainian dialects, terminology, and historical context while ensuring sensitive national data is securely processed within Ukraine [2] - Google was chosen for this initiative to strengthen technological ties between Ukraine and the United States, particularly following Kyivstar's Nasdaq listing in August 2025 [3] - The project is expected to enhance digital services across public and private sectors in Ukraine, with applications in areas such as education, finance, and healthcare [5] Group 2: Technical Development - Kyivstar will lead the operational development of the LLM, focusing on training the model with unique Ukrainian data to minimize linguistic and ethical risks [4] - The initiative will first optimize Google Gemma for the Ukrainian language, refining its tokenizer and training it on curated datasets [6] - Dedicated benchmarks will guide the model's fine-tuning and adaptation for specific applications [6] Group 3: Strategic Importance - This initiative is part of VEON's broader strategy to address the AI language gap in its markets, following similar projects in Kazakhstan and Pakistan [7] - The investment in the Ukrainian LLM is part of a larger commitment by Kyivstar and VEON to invest USD 1 billion in Ukraine from 2023 to 2027, focusing on infrastructure and technological development [8]