The Quest for Latin America's AI Voice

In a bold move against technological dependency, Latin America is coding its cultural identity into artificial intelligence. Spearheaded by Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), the Latam-GPT project unites 33 institutions across the region to build an open-source large language model specifically designed to understand Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, dialects, and cultural nuances—something global models consistently overlook.

"We're not looking to compete with OpenAI or Google. We want a model specific to Latin America and the Caribbean, aware of cultural requirements like understanding dialects, our history, and unique cultural aspects," explains Álvaro Soto, Director of CENIA, in an exclusive interview with WIRED en Español.

Engineering Cultural Context

The initiative has amassed over 8 terabytes of text—equivalent to millions of books—curated from 20 countries. Brazil leads contributions (685,000 documents), followed by Mexico (385,000), Spain (325,000), Colombia (220,000), and Argentina (210,000). This deliberate geographical distribution ensures balanced representation rather than dominance by larger economies.

Latam-GPT's architecture mirrors GPT-3.5 in scale with 50 billion parameters, enabling complex reasoning and translation. But its true differentiation lies in training data encompassing regional politics, literature, indigenous knowledge systems (like Aztec and Inca heritage), and local idioms—elements absent in Northern Hemisphere models.

The Infrastructure of Sovereignty

Powering this ambition is a new supercomputing cluster at Chile's University of Tarapacá, featuring:
- 12 nodes with 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs each
- $10 million investment
- Energy-efficient design to minimize environmental impact

This infrastructure enables in-region training previously impossible due to computational constraints. "Computing power is the field. We need to develop it for this technological era, just as telecommunications were for the internet," Soto emphasizes.

Beyond Language: The Strategic Imperative

The project counters two critical gaps: cultural relevance and technological access. When asked about Latin America's exclusion from mainstream AI development, Soto notes:

"If you ask commercial models about education reform, they reference George Washington. We need examples from our own history. We cannot wait for others to ask what we need."

Future phases will incorporate indigenous languages (Mapuche, Rapanui, Guaraní) and domain-specific adaptations for education, healthcare, and agriculture. By open-sourcing the model, CENIA invites local institutions to build specialized tools—a Colombian education variant or Brazilian health diagnostic assistant.

The Cultural Algorithm

Latam-GPT represents more than technical achievement; it's a safeguard against cultural erosion in AI. As global models homogenize knowledge, this effort ensures Latin American perspectives inform regional AI applications. Early benchmarks suggest it will match commercial models on general tasks while excelling on local context queries.

The first version launches in 2024. If successful, it could redefine Global South AI development—proving technological sovereignty begins with data that speaks your language.

Source: Translated from original interview by WIRED en Español. Full interview available here.