The AI Born in Rome that Studies, Reads, Listens, and Responds: La Sapienza Launches ChatMinerva
The Sapienza NLP research group of Sapienza University of Rome has presented ChatMinerva, a new evolution of the LLM model Minerva. This is a multimodal AI assistant capable of performing various tasks.
A Versatile AI Assistant
ChatMinerva is designed to understand texts, images, and documents, access the web in real time, and can also converse in Italian, ensuring better performance in terms of reliability and security compared to the previous model. The project is entirely developed in Italy and offers an open, transparent, and controllable approach.
As highlighted in the introduction, ChatMinerva is a true multimodal assistant. Among the innovations, we find multimodal understanding, with the ability to comprehend visual and textual inputs as well as performing OCR on scanned texts. There’s also the possibility to interact with the assistant using voice.
Notably, it also features real-time web access, including the ability to conduct searches through the DuckDuckGo search engine. The management of long documents has also improved, with the ability to utilize a contextual window of up to 32,000 tokens. It has also been specified that the model integrates a dedicated component for controlling and validating inputs and responses.
The improvements have also come thanks to a training process that involves the user community. Roberto Navigli, a professor at Sapienza and project leader, emphasized: "Minerva has grown together with its users. Every prompt, interaction, and feedback has contributed to building a more useful, robust AI assistant that meets the real needs of people."
The Future of the Project
The future of the project unfolds in four points:
- Continuous improvement of ChatMinerva with ongoing updates
- Launch of Agentic Minerva
- Development of a larger and more powerful Minerva model
- Frontier research that will make Minerva a unique model in its own right.
To use ChatMinerva, simply visit the official website.