The Ministry of Digital Transformation has created an artificial intelligence unit. Plans include the launch of a «national LLM»

The Ministry of Digital Transformation has launched a separate unit for artificial intelligence — primarily aimed at «comprehensive integration of» AI solutions into the state, but with plans to create competitors to DeepSeek and OpenAI (in the future).

What will the unit do?

The WINWIN AI Center of Excellence (the name of the division) is among the priorities of the division:

• development of a national strategy and program for investing in research and development of AI solutions;
• creating the «best legal environment in the world» for the development of artificial intelligence;
• growth of AI startups by 50% annually (minimum);
• developing the status of the state with the largest number of AI specialists in Europe.

There are separate plans for 2025 — and here, interestingly enough, the creation of a «national LLM model for public services», as well as the integration of artificial intelligence into applications «Action» and «Mriya».

Who is the head of the team and what specialists are they planning to hire?

WINWIN AI Center has been appointed as a manager:

• Danylo Tsvok is an expert with more than 10 years of experience in innovation, having worked on AI solutions in corporate R&D and government agencies.
• Dmytro Ovcharenko — CTO with 17 years of experience in IT product development and AI implementation, expert in building competence centers, and former director of GenAI practice at SoftServe.

According to the publication DOUThe AI center of the Ministry of Digital Transformation plans to develop its own R&D team and opens positions in Data Science, MLOps Engineering; Python specialists will be hired. They plan to create separate departments for GenAI/NLP/LLM, Computer Vision. They are also looking for business analysts, project managers, specialists to work with grants, international partners, etc.

The first hires will take place this quarter, and specialists will be primarily involved in the creation of AI assistants in projects «Action»» «Dream» and AI Legal (an assistant for digital expertise, document validation, and the creation and analysis of legal acts).

It is worth noting that the initiative was created within the framework of the WINWIN 2030 Digital Innovation Development Strategy of Ukraine (yes, the same one that provides for the launch of chip production in Ukraine), and the project concept was developed with the support of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCDO) and Deloitte UKIt should be reminded that the main donor of the Ministry of Digital Transformation was USAID, which is now under threat of closure. A new report by Forbes Ukraine states that the Ministry will be able to received at least $40.5 million from the organization, while the EU — almost four times less. By the way, the previous project of the Ministry of Digital Transformation on AI regulation was also funded by USAID.