Poland cannot just use AI. It also needs the ability to build its own models and safeguards.
Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, how we learn and how we decide. As AI advances, organisations also need safeguards that let them use it responsibly while effectively managing the risks it introduces.
As regulations such as the AI Act come into force, AI safety is becoming a foundation of responsible deployment.
We did not want Poland to be only a consumer of foreign AI safety solutions. So we set out to build a model of our own.
Baszta grew out of a need to build AI expertise in Poland.
We focused on our strengths: research and legal expertise, engineering experience, and a deep understanding of the Polish language. Rather than compete on size with the largest models, we specialised.
Our goal was never to produce one more classifier. We wanted to show that Poland can build its own specialised AI solutions - including in AI safety.
We are sharing the process, not just the result.
We are not showing only the successes. We are also showing the experiments that led nowhere, the limits of the model, and the assumptions we had to revise along the way.
We believe AI advances faster when teams share what they learn. When a Polish AI model succeeds, the whole ecosystem benefits. By sharing what we learned, we hope to help other teams build faster, make better decisions, and develop safer systems. Baszta is our contribution to building Polish expertise in AI safety.
Adam GórskiMateusz JąkalakRafał JakubowskiKrystian KoziełPaweł Wcisło
Data beat a bigger model
The largest gain came from fitting the data better, not from another change to the architecture. Synthetic examples reflecting new forms of harmful content helped Baszta handle cases it had not seen before.
A safe model should know when it is uncertain
We found that a model can classify threats correctly while still being too confident when it encounters unfamiliar data. That is why calibration became one of the central parts of Baszta.
From lab results to the real world
We evaluated Baszta both on familiar benchmarks and on new scenarios it had not seen before, to understand where it performs well and where it still needs improvement.
