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The APA – Austria Press Agency has become the first media organisation in the German-speaking world to implement an AI model from the BERT family, developed in-house in collaboration with AI Factory Austria AI:AT. The “AustroBERT” model, implemented as part of the FFG research project FAIRmedia, was trained exclusively on APA news agency reports and serves as the basis for categorising media texts. The introduction of this pre-trained model, based on clean data that is free from licensing issues, broadens the technological options available for BERT systems in Austria and thus represents an important step towards domestic information and technological sovereignty. The model is published under an academic licence and can therefore be used free of charge by research and educational institutions. Furthermore, the APA is making the technology and model available to all interested media organisations as a collaborative infrastructure.

A new, large-scale initiative called "AI Factory Austria" (AI:AT) will have a lasting positive impact on the Austrian artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem. As officially announced on 12 March 2025, funding has been secured through the EU's European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking Programme. AI:AT is thus making a significant contribution to the European initiatives aimed at increasing Europe's competitiveness and innovative capacity in the field of AI.