The fate of Amália
The Portuguese AI model cannot sing yet, but it already recognises the fado singer it is named after. The project has kept to the Government’s calendar, but should only go public in 2026, against expectations.
It was a rabbit out of a hat. On 11 November, at the very opening of Web Summit 2024, the prime minister, Luís Montenegro, announced by surprise that the Government would “launch a Portuguese LLM” (Large Language Model) “in the first quarter of 2025”. “So that we innovate in Portuguese, preserving our language and putting our culture at the service of innovation.”
Speaking of a “critical step” for the country, the head of government listed some of the uses of what would come to be called Amália (an acronym, in Portuguese, for “Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with Artificial Intelligence”): giving “every pupil an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor”; offering citizens access to public services “in a simpler, more direct and more personalised way”; and giving companies “the opportunity to design their services” with AI “in Portuguese too”.
AI translation from the Portuguese. First published in ECO on 20 July 2025.