Latin American countries to launch own AI model in September
This open-source project, steered by Chile's state-run National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) alongside over 30 regional institutions, seeks to significantly increase the uptake and accessibility of AI across Latin America.
Chilean Science Minister Aisen Etcheverry said the project "could be a democratizing element for AI," envisioning its application in schools and hospitals with a model that reflects the local culture and language.
Developed starting in January 2023, Latam-GPT seeks to overcome inaccuracies and performance limitations of global AI models predominantly trained on English.
Officials said that it was meant to be the core technology for developing applications like chatbots, not a direct competitor to consumer products like ChatGPT.
A key goal is preserving Indigenous languages, with an initial translator already developed for Rapa Nui, Easter Island's native language.
The project plans to extend this to other Indigenous languages for applications like virtual public service assistants and personalized education systems.
The model is based on Llama 3 AI technology and is trained using a regional network of computers, including facilities at Chile's University of Tarapaca and cloud-based systems.
Regional development bank CAF and Amazon Web Services have supported it.
While currently lacking a dedicated budget, CENIA head Alvaro Soto hopes that demonstrating the system's capabilities will attract more funding.
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Rising sea levels could erase one of the planet's iconic heritage sites
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The Independent
13 hours ago
- The Independent
Iconic Easter Island statues could be gone in 60 years, study warns
Easter Island's iconic moai statues face an existential threat from rising sea levels, with powerful seasonal waves predicted to inundate the 15 monumental figures at Ahu Tongariki by the end of the century, according to a new study. The research, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, also warns that approximately 50 other cultural sites on the remote Pacific island are at risk of flooding. "Sea level rise is real," stated Noah Paoa, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. "It's not a distant threat." Mr Paoa, of Easter Island (known to its Indigenous people as Rapa Nui), and his team created a high-resolution "digital twin" of the island's eastern coastline, running computer models to simulate future wave impacts under various sea level rise scenarios. Their findings indicate that waves could reach Ahu Tongariki, the island's largest ceremonial platform, as early as 2080. This site, home to the towering moai, attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually and is crucial to the island's tourism economy. Beyond its economic value, the ahu is deeply intertwined with Rapa Nui's cultural identity, lying within Rapa Nui National Park, a recognized UNESCO World Heritage site. The roughly 900 moai statues across the island were carved by the Rapa Nui people between the 10th and 16th centuries to honor important ancestors and chiefs. The threat is not unprecedented; a magnitude 9.5 earthquake off the coast of Chile in 1960 triggered a tsunami that swept already-toppled moai further inland, damaging some features before the monument was restored in the 1990s. Rising seas could put Easter Island's moai at risk by 2080, study warns Show all 2 While the study focuses on Rapa Nui, its conclusions underscore a broader global reality: cultural heritage sites worldwide are increasingly imperiled by rising seas. A UNESCO report last month revealed that around 50 World Heritage sites are highly exposed to coastal flooding. Possible defences for Ahu Tongariki range from armoring the coastline and constructing breakwaters to the drastic measure of relocating the monuments. Mr Paoa hopes his findings will prompt these crucial conversations now, before irreversible damage occurs. "It's best to look ahead and be proactive instead of reactive to the potential threats," he urged. ___
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Daily Mail
Scientists baffled by mysterious new statue emerging on Easter Island: 'This is a first'
A new statue has emerged from the dirt of a recently dried-up lakebed on Easter Island, baffling scientists who said it should not be there. Easter Island is considered a mystery due to its 1,000 large stone heads, known as moai, which are 700 to 1,000 years old. Terry Hunt, professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, told Good Morning America: 'We think we know all the moai, but then a new one turns up, a new discovery, and in this case, it's in the lake, at the statue quarry. 'There have been no moai found in the dry lakebed before, so this is a first.' The newly discovered moai is among the smallest found, suggesting that many more could be hidden within the reeds. Each moai honors a person, usually a leader, and many are topped with eye stones at their resting place. The largest stands over 30 feet tall and weighs up to 86 tons. 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This idea is reinforced by the fact that Easter Island's famous Moai statues, estimated to have been built between AD 1250 and 1500, are unique to the location. For the past decade, Hunt and his colleagues and students have created an inventory of 981 moai on the island, complete with precise GPS locations and measurements. Many moai remain in a quarry near Rano Raraku, the now-dry crater lake where the newest statue was found, in various stages of completion. The largest, called Te Tokanga or 'The Giant' in the Rapa Nui language, was never finished and lies on its back, measuring 63 feet long and weighing an estimated 90 to 100 tons. The team made a similar discovery in 2023, finding another new moa that measured five feet by six inches long and was found face up in the ground. Hunt said the statue's eye sockets had been carved, which is historically the final step in a moai's construction before display. The base is also flat, rather than sloped, to help with moving the statue. 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The island was populated with multiple waves of new inhabitants who bravely traversed the Pacific Ocean from west to east. 'Easter Island was settled from central East Polynesia around AD 1200-1250,' study author Professor Paul Wallin at Uppsala University told the Daily Mail. 'The Polynesians were skilled sailors, so double canoes were used.' For their study, the team at Uppsala University compared archaeological data and radiocarbon dates from settlements, ritual spaces and monuments across Polynesia, the collection of more than 1,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. The experts point out that ahu stone platforms were historically constructed at Polynesian islands further to the west. These rectangular clearings were communal ritual spaces that, in some places, remain sacred to this day. 'The temple grounds ahu [also known as marae] exist on all East Polynesian islands,' Professor Wallin added. The team agreed that an early population of people spread from the west of the Pacific to the east before encountering Easter Island and populating it around AD 1200. They argued that Easter Island was populated several times by new seafarers, and not just once by a single group that remained isolated for centuries, as previously assumed. 'The migration process from West Polynesian core areas such as Tonga and Samoa to East Polynesia is not disputed here,' they say in their paper. 'Still, the static west-to-east colonization and dispersal suggested for East Polynesia and the idea that Rapa Nui was only colonized once in the past and developed in isolation are challenged.' Based on their evidence, they also think ahu originated on Easter Island before the trend spread east to west across other western Polynesian islands during the period of AD 1300-1600. It was only after this that the Polynesian islands, including but not limited to Easter Island, might have become isolated from each other.
