“A prova di AI” is IT4LIA AI Factory’s podcast about how artificial intelligence is actually applied inside Italian organisations. Every episode, a real case: a concrete challenge, the decisions made along the way and the results achieved.
In each episode, entrepreneurs, decision makers, institutional representatives and innovators share their challenges, objectives and choices, with the support of the IT4LIA AI Factory consortium.
The second episode: Domyn
After the ISTAT case, the second episode raises the technical stakes: it’s about how you train an AI model from scratch, and what it really means to have access to a supercomputer to do it.
The guest of this episode is Domyn, an Italian scale-up also based in the United States, which develops proprietary and sovereign artificial intelligence models. Founded in Milan in 2016, Domyn reached unicorn status in 2024, and today counts almost 150 people across Milan, the US, London and India.
The conversation features Luca Antiga, CTO of Domyn, and Martin Cimmino, Engineering Manager of the research team, alongside Matteo Angelinelli, HPC Data Engineer at CINECA’s Supercomputing division, who has followed the collaboration with Domyn, together with his team, since before IT4LIA AI Factory even existed.
HPC as a gym
One of the central ideas of the episode is the metaphor of supercomputing infrastructure as a gym: a place to train, experiment, fail and improve, not a tool that returns a perfect result on the first attempt.
Domyn represents, in this sense, a particular case: it is the organisation that has used the largest amount of resources made available by IT4LIA AI Factory, with almost 10 million GPU hours consumed on the Leonardo supercomputer to develop part of its family of models, from its first release in 2024 to its most recent models, today among the best in their category internationally.
Why build your own model
The episode also addresses a question increasingly relevant to companies: why invest time and resources in training a proprietary model, when systems like ChatGPT or Claude are already available and ready to use?
The theme is sovereignty: control over your own data, over the availability of infrastructure, over the model’s accuracy in your specific domain. A theme that concerns individual companies as much as, more broadly, the strategic autonomy of an entire country system.
Listen to the episode now
“A prova di AI” is available on YouTube and Spotify – listen to the Domyn episode now.
Do you have a case to share or want to understand how IT4LIA AI Factory can support your project?
