Latin America has been the cradle of now globally popular literary and musical genres, staple foods like the potato and the inspiration behind the well-known Happy Meal. It could also become the cradle of a new form of AI.
A coalition of research institutions is working on what they call LatAmGPT — a tool that can take into account the region’s language variances, cultural experiences and “idiosyncrasies.”
The aim is to offer users a more faithful peek into and representation of the Americas and the Caribbean than that of large language models (LLMs) that have mostly come from U.S. or Chinese companies and were largely trained in English.
“We want to develop our capabilities, find local AI-based solutions and create a better understanding of these tools in Latin America and about Latin America,” said Rodrigo Durán Rojas, director of Chile’s National Center for Artificial Intelligence, which is coordinating the effort.
Durán Rojas said that for general purposes, the project will be hard pressed to compete with “state of the art models with multimillion budgets,” but that “what our model can offer that others don’t is a much richer and representative outlook of Latin America and the Caribbean,” its people and its outputs.
For example, Durán Rojas said initial testing has shown LatAmGPT to have far better results when queried about South American history, and that the same is expected for when the LLM is asked to, say, write a poem in the style of local authors or provide an overview of regional education policy.
There are more than 30 institutions involved in developing LatAmGPT from countries across the hemisphere, and collaborators include Latinos in the U.S. such as Freddy Vilches Meneses, an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. This, he said, is in recognition of how “Latino and Latin American experiences are a cultural fellowship that goes beyond geography.”
“There are elements of…
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