Latest news with #Lewis&ClarkCollege
Sharjah 24
30-06-2025
- Business
- Sharjah 24
Cabinet appoints Saeed Al Hajeri as Chairman of Emirates Drug Est.
Al Hajeri brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this critical role. Currently the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs for Economic and Trade Affairs, he holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Lewis & Clark College and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). He has also completed the Executive Education Programme at Harvard Business School. Throughout his distinguished career, Al Hajeri has served in senior leadership positions within various UAE and Abu Dhabi government entities. His experience includes: Executive Director at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA); Chairman of the Board of the CFA Institute; Chairman of the Board of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank; Chairman of the Board of Salama Insurance Company; Board member of Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (TAQA); and Board member of the Zayed Higher Organisation for People of Determination. Recognised for his exceptional contributions to the UAE's public and financial sectors, Al Hajeri was named one of the World Economic Forum's Top 250 Young Global Leaders in 2007. He actively participates in numerous national-level economic and investment committees and councils and serves as the UAE's Sherpa to the BRICS group.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How to Save Endangered Species Without a Detailed Plan for Every Bee
The Endangered Species Act always had a hole in it. It was intended to protect ecosystems as well as individual species—it says so right in the original 1973 text—but it has no provisions to do so directly. For decades, conservationists successfully plugged that hole by arguing in court that the ESA's prohibition of harm to individual species includes destroying a species' habitat. Now the Trump administration wants to negate that argument by asserting that to harm an endangered species means only to injure or kill it directly: to rip it out by the roots or blow it away with a shotgun. Habitat destruction has been the most common threat to endangered species in the U.S. since 1975. If the administration succeeds in redefining harm to exclude it, the Endangered Species Act won't be able to effectively protect most endangered species. That much of the act's power can be destroyed by tweaking its definition of one phrase reveals its central weakness. Preserving old-growth forest for a single owl species (to give a classic example) means the forest—and everything living there—suddenly loses protection if that owl goes extinct anyway (as the northern spotted owl very well could). And the law requires that the government undertake heroic and expensive measures to save the most imperiled species, rather than using habitat protection to shore up populations before they truly crash. 'The act has no concept of preventive medicine,' the conservation advocate and author Suzanne Winckler wrote in these pages in 1992. 'On the contrary, it attempts to save the hardest cases, the equivalent of the terminally ill and the brain-dead.' Conservationists haven't really wanted to talk about this, though, on the theory that opening debate about the law would risk losing it all. The ESA passed during a unique moment in the early 1970s, when a Republican president could talk about the nation's 'environmental awakening,' and for all its flaws, the act is still considered one of the strongest and most effective biodiversity-protection laws in the world. But the Trump administration has now opened that debate—forcing a conversation about how we protect species and ecosystems that some conservationists say is long overdue. Many conservationists have a long-standing dream solution to the ESA's circuitous mechanism for protecting places: What if we just protected ecosystems directly? Forty-one percent of terrestrial American ecosystems are at risk of collapse, according to a 2023 report by NatureServe, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data on biodiversity. Most of them are largely unprotected. Jay Odenbaugh, an environmental philosopher at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, told me that shifting to protecting ecosystems would obviate the need to 'chase down every last little species.' It would be more efficient. 'We can't save everything,' Odenbaugh said. 'What we are trying to do is protect larger structural features.' Reed Noss, a conservationist based at the University of Florida and the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, does still want to try to save every species. But he argues that only a few—large carnivores that face persecution and orchids collected for illegal trading, for example—need special, individual protections. Meanwhile, Noss estimates that 85 percent of species could be saved by simply protecting a sufficiently large chunk of each type of American ecosystem. He has therefore been one of the most vocal advocates for what he calls a 'native ecosystem–protection act' to supplement the ESA since the 1990s. The U.S. already has multiple systems that categorize lands and fresh water into ecosystem types. The U.S. National Vegetation Classification, for instance, describes natural systems at a series of scales from very broad types, such as 'Forest & Woodland,' to hyper-specific descriptors, such as 'Eastern White Pine-Eastern Hemlock Lower New England-Northern Piedmont Forest.' An ecosystem-protection act would direct the government to choose (or develop) one such classification system, then ensure that each type of ecosystem had sufficient area protected. Making that decision would surely involve ecologists arguing over how to categorize ecosystems. Philosophers might argue about whether ecosystems even exist—if they are more than the sum of the organisms that comprise them. But, for the purposes of policy, more important than arriving at essential truths would be creating categories that make sense to the public and describe the things the public cares about: old-growth forest, tallgrass prairie, the Everglades, Great Basin sagebrush steppe, the deciduous forests of the Northeast, and so on. Something like this was tried with Pacific Northwest old-growth forest in the 1990s; known as the Northwest Forest Plan, it is meant to protect not just the owl but old growth more broadly—but the plan, which is still in use, covers only one ecosystem type. Part of the appeal of a system that directly protects ecosystems is that it recognizes that they're dynamic. Species have always moved and evolved, shifting the composition and relationships within systems through time. And today, climate change is prompting many species to move. But Odenbaugh and Noss see ecosystems as entities that will remain coherent enough to protect. Florida, for instance, has sandhill ecosystems (sandy hills that support longleaf pine and oaks with wire grass) and wet flatwoods (which are seasonally inundated)—and 'a sandhill and a flatwoods are going to remain a sandhill and a flatwoods even if their species composition changes due to climate change,' Noss told me. A robust network of many different kinds of ecosystems—especially one well connected by corridors so species can move—would support and protect most of America's species without the government having to develop a separate plan for each flower and bee. Many who fight on conservation's front lines still hesitate to advocate for such a law. The Environmental Species Act, as it is, achieves similar purposes, they argue—and it could be pushed in the opposite direction that the Trump administration wants to pull it. When I spoke with Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is dedicated to forcing the federal government to abide by its own environmental laws, he described his vision of a conservation-minded president who could, like Donald Trump, use executive power quickly and aggressively, only to conserve nature. 'The secretary of the interior and the head of Fish and Wildlife, they have, already, the power under the ESA to do basically anything they want, as long as it is supported by the best available science,' he said. So, in theory, they could translocate species to help them survive climate change, or broaden the boundaries of 'critical habitat,' which is protected from destruction by actions taken, permitted, or funded by the federal government (unless exceptions are granted). Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College who has studied the ESA for more than three decades, agrees that decisive leadership could do more to protect ecosystems by skillfully wielding the current ESA: 'Critical habitat' could be treated as sacrosanct. Federal actions could be assessed not just for direct harm to species but for the harm they would cause via greenhouse-gas emissions. The 'range' of a species could be defined as its historic or possible range, not just the scraps of territory it clings to in the present. 'You could do all that tomorrow under the current version of the act,' Rohlf told me. And he believes that, unlike many of the actions Trump is taking, a lot of these stronger interpretations would likely hold up in court. The political prospects for an entirely new ecosystem-protection act are low, even in a Democratic administration: Although 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters that 'stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost,' these days politicians of all stripes seem to want to cut red tape and build stuff. And Suckling believes that his organization and others like it will be able to block or undo Trump's proposed changes to the ESA's definition of harm. 'We overturned all his first-term ESA regulation changes and are confident we'll overturn this one as well,' he said. The U.S. may well just keep conserving the way we have been, through the ESA, and often in court. But an ecosystem-protection act could also be a unifying cause. Love for American landscapes is bipartisan, and protecting ecosystems would not necessarily mean outlawing all human use inside them. Ranching and recreation are compatible with many ecosystems. Tribal management could protect biodiversity and support traditional use. Caring for these ecosystems takes work, and that means jobs—physical, outdoor jobs, many of which can be filled by people without college degrees. Farmers and ranchers can also be compensated for tending to ecosystems in addition to growing food, buffering their income from the vagaries of extreme weather and trade wars. The United States is an idea, but it is also a place, a beautiful quilt of ecosystems that are not valuable just because they contain 'biodiversity' or even because they filter our water, produce fish and game, and store carbon. Our forests, prairies, mountains, coastlines, and swamps are knit into our sense of who we are, both individually and as a people. We love them, and we have the power to protect them, if we choose to. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How to Save Endangered Species Without a Detailed Plan for Every Bee
The Endangered Species Act always had a hole in it. It was intended to protect ecosystems as well as individual species—it says so right in the original 1973 text—but it has no provisions to do so directly. For decades, conservationists successfully plugged that hole by arguing in court that the ESA's prohibition of harm to individual species includes destroying a species' habitat. Now the Trump administration wants to negate that argument by asserting that to harm an endangered species means only to injure or kill it directly: to rip it out by the roots or blow it away with a shotgun. Habitat destruction has been the most common threat to endangered species in the U.S. since 1975. If the administration succeeds in redefining harm to exclude it, the Endangered Species Act won't be able to effectively protect most endangered species. That much of the act's power can be destroyed by tweaking its definition of one phrase reveals its central weakness. Preserving old-growth forest for a single owl species (to give a classic example) means the forest—and everything living there—suddenly loses protection if that owl goes extinct anyway (as the northern spotted owl very well could). And the law requires that the government undertake heroic and expensive measures to save the most imperiled species, rather than using habitat protection to shore up populations before they truly crash. 'The act has no concept of preventive medicine,' the conservation advocate and author Suzanne Winckler wrote in these pages in 1992. 'On the contrary, it attempts to save the hardest cases, the equivalent of the terminally ill and the brain-dead.' Conservationists haven't really wanted to talk about this, though, on the theory that opening debate about the law would risk losing it all. The ESA passed during a unique moment in the early 1970s, when a Republican president could talk about the nation's 'environmental awakening,' and for all its flaws, the act is still considered one of the strongest and most effective biodiversity-protection laws in the world. But the Trump administration has now opened that debate—forcing a conversation about how we protect species and ecosystems that some conservationists say is long overdue. Many conservationists have a long-standing dream solution to the ESA's circuitous mechanism for protecting places: What if we just protected ecosystems directly? Forty-one percent of terrestrial American ecosystems are at risk of collapse, according to a 2023 report by NatureServe, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data on biodiversity. Most of them are largely unprotected. Jay Odenbaugh, an environmental philosopher at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, told me that shifting to protecting ecosystems would obviate the need to 'chase down every last little species.' It would be more efficient. 'We can't save everything,' Odenbaugh said. 'What we are trying to do is protect larger structural features.' Reed Noss, a conservationist based at the University of Florida and the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, does still want to try to save every species. But he argues that only a few—large carnivores that face persecution and orchids collected for illegal trading, for example—need special, individual protections. Meanwhile, Noss estimates that 85 percent of species could be saved by simply protecting a sufficiently large chunk of each type of American ecosystem. He has therefore been one of the most vocal advocates for what he calls a 'native ecosystem–protection act' to supplement the ESA since the 1990s. The U.S. already has multiple systems that categorize lands and fresh water into ecosystem types. The U.S. National Vegetation Classification, for instance, describes natural systems at a series of scales from very broad types, such as 'Forest & Woodland,' to hyper-specific descriptors, such as ' Eastern White Pine-Eastern Hemlock Lower New England-Northern Piedmont Forest.' An ecosystem-protection act would direct the government to choose (or develop) one such classification system, then ensure that each type of ecosystem had sufficient area protected. Making that decision would surely involve ecologists arguing over how to categorize ecosystems. Philosophers might argue about whether ecosystems even exist—if they are more than the sum of the organisms that comprise them. But, for the purposes of policy, more important than arriving at essential truths would be creating categories that make sense to the public and describe the things the public cares about: old-growth forest, tallgrass prairie, the Everglades, Great Basin sagebrush steppe, the deciduous forests of the Northeast, and so on. Something like this was tried with Pacific Northwest old-growth forest in the 1990s; known as the Northwest Forest Plan, it is meant to protect not just the owl but old growth more broadly—but the plan, which is still in use, covers only one ecosystem type. Part of the appeal of a system that directly protects ecosystems is that it recognizes that they're dynamic. Species have always moved and evolved, shifting the composition and relationships within systems through time. And today, climate change is prompting many species to move. But Odenbaugh and Noss see ecosystems as entities that will remain coherent enough to protect. Florida, for instance, has sandhill ecosystems (sandy hills that support longleaf pine and oaks with wire grass) and wet flatwoods (which are seasonally inundated)—and 'a sandhill and a flatwoods are going to remain a sandhill and a flatwoods even if their species composition changes due to climate change,' Noss told me. A robust network of many different kinds of ecosystems—especially one well connected by corridors so species can move—would support and protect most of America's species without the government having to develop a separate plan for each flower and bee. Many who fight on conservation's front lines still hesitate to advocate for such a law. The Environmental Species Act, as it is, achieves similar purposes, they argue—and it could be pushed in the opposite direction that the Trump administration wants to pull it. When I spoke with Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is dedicated to forcing the federal government to abide by its own environmental laws, he described his vision of a conservation-minded president who could, like Donald Trump, use executive power quickly and aggressively, only to conserve nature. 'The secretary of the interior and the head of Fish and Wildlife, they have, already, the power under the ESA to do basically anything they want, as long as it is supported by the best available science,' he said. So, in theory, they could translocate species to help them survive climate change, or broaden the boundaries of ' critical habitat,' which is protected from destruction by actions taken, permitted, or funded by the federal government (unless exceptions are granted). Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College who has studied the ESA for more than three decades, agrees that decisive leadership could do more to protect ecosystems by skillfully wielding the current ESA: 'Critical habitat' could be treated as sacrosanct. Federal actions could be assessed not just for direct harm to species but for the harm they would cause via greenhouse-gas emissions. The 'range' of a species could be defined as its historic or possible range, not just the scraps of territory it clings to in the present. 'You could do all that tomorrow under the current version of the act,' Rohlf told me. And he believes that, unlike many of the actions Trump is taking, a lot of these stronger interpretations would likely hold up in court. The political prospects for an entirely new ecosystem-protection act are low, even in a Democratic administration: Although 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters that 'stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost,' these days politicians of all stripes seem to want to cut red tape and build stuff. And Suckling believes that his organization and others like it will be able to block or undo Trump's proposed changes to the ESA's definition of harm. 'We overturned all his first-term ESA regulation changes and are confident we'll overturn this one as well,' he said. The U.S. may well just keep conserving the way we have been, through the ESA, and often in court. But an ecosystem-protection act could also be a unifying cause. Love for American landscapes is bipartisan, and protecting ecosystems would not necessarily mean outlawing all human use inside them. Ranching and recreation are compatible with many ecosystems. Tribal management could protect biodiversity and support traditional use. Caring for these ecosystems takes work, and that means jobs—physical, outdoor jobs, many of which can be filled by people without college degrees. Farmers and ranchers can also be compensated for tending to ecosystems in addition to growing food, buffering their income from the vagaries of extreme weather and trade wars. The United States is an idea, but it is also a place, a beautiful quilt of ecosystems that are not valuable just because they contain 'biodiversity' or even because they filter our water, produce fish and game, and store carbon. Our forests, prairies, mountains, coastlines, and swamps are knit into our sense of who we are, both individually and as a people. We love them, and we have the power to protect them, if we choose to.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
LatAmGPT aims to create AI that better represents the region's diversity
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 Latin America in Oregon, in California, in Texas," Vilches Meneses said. "We want to make sure to incorporate that Latino experience as well.' LatAmGPT, which aims to launch its first publicly available version around June, was announced last month on the heels of a regional commitment made during a summit on artificial intelligence in Uruguay to focus on 'ethical, inclusive and beneficial' technological development to 'promote and protect human rights' and explore the best possible public policies for AI governance. That impulse follows an increasing uptake in the region of technological advances such as the use of drones to monitor deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the development of apps to encourage more people to continue learning Indigenous languages, the creation of algorithms to aid in the search for forcibly disappeared people or the adoption of blockchain mechanisms to preserve historical documents of past dictatorship's actions. Some of those preserved documents are now being used as sources to train LatAmGPT, along with papers, records and logs that institutions such as libraries and national archives have made available specifically for the project. Durán Rojas said this gives the model more nuance and localized breadth than the general internet data scraping other systems tend to use. 'LatAmGPT will have more context than the other model languages and should therefore hallucinate far less' when it comes to its use cases, Durán Rojas said. Hallucination is what AI researchers call when a model seemingly makes up an answer that's incorrect or false though it's presented as factual. So far the project's dataset has more than 8 terabytes of information so the model can run on about 55 billion parameters (the variables with which an LLM makes a prediction output, like neurons that synapse or connect in a human brain). Durán Rojas said that's somewhat close to what the first public version of ChatGPT had when OpenAI launched it in the fall of 2022. ChatGPT and other models like Google's Gemini have also sought in recent years to include a wider scope of data to offer the programs in languages other than English and with 'localizations'— such as the LLM knowing to respond in the metric system when relevant or to understand idioms. Those companies acknowledge the importance of expanding that offering. HyunJeong Choe, the director of engineering and internationalization for Google's Gemini Apps, said it's 'a dedicated experience' that can be 'essential for cultural relevancy and sensitivity.' But they also recognize it's a particularly complex endeavor, since most training data available to them is in English. 'The intricacies of different languages can pose a significant obstacle for all AI models. ... Languages with complex grammar, diverse dialects or limited digital resources may be harder to train,' Choe said. LatAmGPT, through its institutional networks with libraries and archives, has somewhat skirted this issue — but not entirely. Durán Rojas said they're still struggling to incorporate Indigenous languages spoken by millions in the region because written documentation is not as widely available. But they're still aiming to try as they continuously perfect their model — though they stress the importance of collaboration. 'The quality and attributes of the results we can get will depend on us as Latin Americans joining in to contribute as much as we can,' said Vilches Meneses, the Lewis & Clark professor. Currently, with the tentative June launch date, LatAmGPT is still receiving data as collaborators regularly check in with specific questions to benchmark it in comparison to other available models. Among the questions they're testing are queries on the many different names and terms used in the region for a specific word like "car," or a request for the GPT to make a comparison chart of how the region's countries have responded to mass immigration from places like Venezuela. A large goal of LatAmGPT is to become familiar with these technological advances so they can be included in public policies and regulations, according to Durán Rojas. For that, the creation of the transcontinental network to help develop the project is key, and per Durán Rojas will likely remain so. 'The most meaningful aspect, the greatest legacy, is this interconnectedness we've found to strengthen and develop AI-based solutions,' he says. 'The model, I mean it's great that we're making it, but the collaboration — that's what will most impact how we build things going forward.' And with that there is a growing opportunity to offer further contributions with a Latino touch. 'At its base, this is jointly creating something from Latin America for Latin America and for the world, as proof to ourselves and to others that we can also produce high tech,' Vilches Meneses said, 'and that we can contribute to knowledge of artificial intelligence while still employing our social and cultural intelligence.' An earlier version of this story was first published by Noticias Telemundo. This article was originally published on
NBC News
26-03-2025
- Science
- NBC News
LatAmGPT aims to create AI that better represents the region's diversity
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 Latin America in Oregon, in California, in Texas," Vilches Meneses said. "We want to make sure to incorporate that Latino experience as well.' LatAmGPT, which aims to launch its first publicly available version around June, was announced last month on the heels of a regional commitment made during a summit on artificial intelligence in Uruguay to focus on 'ethical, inclusive and beneficial' technological development to 'promote and protect human rights' and explore the best possible public policies for AI governance. That impulse follows an increasing uptake in the region of technological advances such as the use of drones to monitor deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the development of apps to encourage more people to continue learning Indigenous languages, the creation of algorithms to aid in the search for forcibly disappeared people or the adoption of blockchain mechanisms to preserve historical documents of past dictatorship's actions. Some of those preserved documents are now being used as sources to train LatAmGPT, along with papers, records and logs that institutions such as libraries and national archives have made available specifically for the project. Durán Rojas said this gives the model more nuance and localized breadth than the general internet data scraping other systems tend to use. 'LatAmGPT will have more context than the other model languages and should therefore hallucinate far less' when it comes to its use cases, Durán Rojas said. Hallucination is what AI researchers call when a model seemingly makes up an answer that's incorrect or false though it's presented as factual. So far the project's dataset has more than 8 terabytes of information so the model can run on about 55 billion parameters (the variables with which an LLM makes a prediction output, like neurons that synapse or connect in a human brain). Durán Rojas said that's somewhat close to what the first public version of ChatGPT had when OpenAI launched it in the fall of 2022. The challenges of diverse dialects and complex grammar ChatGPT and other models like Google's Gemini have also sought in recent years to include a wider scope of data to offer the programs in languages other than English and with 'localizations'— such as the LLM knowing to respond in the metric system when relevant or to understand idioms. Those companies acknowledge the importance of expanding that offering. HyunJeong Choe, the director of engineering and internationalization for Google's Gemini Apps, said it's 'a dedicated experience' that can be 'essential for cultural relevancy and sensitivity.' But they also recognize it's a particularly complex endeavor, since most training data available to them is in English. 'The intricacies of different languages can pose a significant obstacle for all AI models. ... Languages with complex grammar, diverse dialects or limited digital resources may be harder to train,' Choe said. LatAmGPT, through its institutional networks with libraries and archives, has somewhat skirted this issue — but not entirely. Durán Rojas said they're still struggling to incorporate Indigenous languages spoken by millions in the region because written documentation is not as widely available. But they're still aiming to try as they continuously perfect their model — though they stress the importance of collaboration. 'The quality and attributes of the results we can get will depend on us as Latin Americans joining in to contribute as much as we can,' said Vilches Meneses, the Lewis & Clark professor. Currently, with the tentative June launch date, LatAmGPT is still receiving data as collaborators regularly check in with specific questions to benchmark it in comparison to other available models. Among the questions they're testing are queries on the many different names and terms used in the region for a specific word like "car," or a request for the GPT to make a comparison chart of how the region's countries have responded to mass immigration from places like Venezuela. A large goal of LatAmGPT is to become familiar with these technological advances so they can be included in public policies and regulations, according to Durán Rojas. For that, the creation of the transcontinental network to help develop the project is key, and per Durán Rojas will likely remain so. 'The most meaningful aspect, the greatest legacy, is this interconnectedness we've found to strengthen and develop AI-based solutions,' he says. 'The model, I mean it's great that we're making it, but the collaboration — that's what will most impact how we build things going forward.' And with that there is a growing opportunity to offer further contributions with a Latino touch. 'At its base, this is jointly creating something from Latin America for Latin America and for the world, as proof to ourselves and to others that we can also produce high tech,' Vilches Meneses said, 'and that we can contribute to knowledge of artificial intelligence while still employing our social and cultural intelligence.'
