Google grants $1 million for scholarships to young scientists at Bulgaria’s INSAIT

The technological giant Google has chosen the Bulgarian Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) as the beneficiary of one of its largest donations in the field of education in 2024. The US company announced at a special event in Sofia that it will allocate 1 million dollars for scholarships to young scientists.  

This serves as a proof that a world-class scientific product can and is being created in Bulgaria," emphasized the Bulgarian Education Minister Galin Tsokov.

The financial grant announced today is Google's second for INSAIT – the American tech giant provided its first injection of 250,000 dollars for the Bulgarian institute back when it was established two years ago.

INSAIT was founded in April 2022. The high-tech institute, part of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", was financed through public-private funds in the amount of about 100 million euros. Of these, 85 million came from the Bulgarian state, and the rest from companies such as AWS, Google, DeepMind.

Two years later, INSAIT gradually established its role as a scientific organization with great potential. Months ago, the institute became one of the founders of the Global Alliance for Artificial Intelligence along with dozens of technology giants, such as Meta Platforms, IBM, Oracle and Intel, as well as leading educational institutions such as Cornell University, Dartmouth University, ETH Zurich, Imperial College London.

Late last year, another tech giant — Amazon — also announced a new $1 million donation to INSAIT to help establish a professorship in automated thinking.

What INSAIT has achieved in such a short time is impressive, and that is precisely why the Bulgarian state will continue to consistently support the Institute," Tsokov pointed out.

What will the $1 million from Google do?

Within the framework of the granted scholarships, the approved PhD students will have the opportunity to work in Bulgaria with scientific supervisors from INSAIT and Google Research on topics of mutual interest. The funding will help strengthen the Bulgarian Institute's focus in key areas of artificial intelligence such as large language models, computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning and more.

Along with the targeted funding, Google also provides exclusive and free access to some of its specific powerful computing capacities (latest generation tensor processors) to INSAIT, which also equates to approximately $1 million.

The Bulgarian scientific organization ranks among the few in the world that will have the opportunity to use Google's specialized computing power to create generative artificial intelligence. Access to this can hardly be calculated in financial terms, since few scientific organizations possess such equipment at all.

The Google-provided resource for INSAIT has a starting value of $2 million and can reach tens of millions of dollars per year.

Eastern Europe holds incredible potential to contribute to the field of AI – yet the region is significantly underrepresented in research today. Efforts to overcome this challenge are not only the right direction but critical if we want AI to be a technology that benefits everyone," commented Dr. Slav Petrov, Vice President at Google DeepMind.

The decision for the increased funding was taken at the highest level at Google after reviewing INSAIT's results over the past 2 years. It is hoped that the partnership will be beneficial for the entire region.

In March of this year, INSAIT released its own language model, trained in Bulgarian, for public use. There is a plan for the Institute to adapt it to other languages and countries as well.

Translated by Tzvetozar Vincent Iolov