SANTIAGO (Reuters) -A dozen Latin American countries are collaborating to launch Latam-GPT in September, the first large artificial intelligence language model trained to understand the region's diverse cultures and linguistic nuances, Chilean officials said on Tuesday.

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.