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A company called Kiefer is embarking on a big challenge: creating an LLM model application specifically for the nation of Greece, an island state with around 10.5 million people. According to technologists like Christos, who spoke recently about the effort, Greece needs its own model.
He mentioned a goal that motivates the team: to establish dominance with specific market needs, where linguistic and cultural targeting provides advantages.
"Greek models have superior performance applications with deep understanding of Greek languages, cultural context, and local businesses," he said, "because all of our data is based on Greece."
To be sure, it's a tough job.
"We face a lot of issues because of all of the data," he said. "It's mostly (in) books that we need to scan and everything that exists on the Internet. It's all PDFs that you need to curate to extract the data, and after that, to be able to train the model."
There are also headwinds to adoption: Christos cited roughly 9% buy-in, with lower numbers in the government and public sectors.
Under the Hood: What Does Kiefer Use
In responding to questions about architecture, Christos said the project uses three different models including one from DeepSeek, which he said was chosen partly because of accuracy, and partly because the model is open source.
As for other models, he mentioned Nemotron, and a demo from Google, along with interest in Minimax.
Right now, the service is free. But Christos said there's a plan for subscription pricing in the future.
"After we make some implementation (in terms of modalities like) video, we'll start to have a subscription fee per month, which would be lower than the big companies," he said.
Part of that, he added, is to cover costs, like the use of Nvidia hardware.