Dominican Republic Leads the Cultural Benchmark of LatamGPT, Latin America's First Large Open Language Model

From left to right: Arturo López Valerio (Tabuga), Mónica Soto (CENIA), Álvaro Soto (CENIA) and Alba Nely Familia (CDN).

Alvaro Soto, director of CENIA, presenting the cultural benchmark of the Latam GPT model.

Arturo López Valerio, technology entrepreneur and founder of Tabuga in the facilities of TVN Chile.

Tabuga orchestrates Dominican participation in the first Latin American artificial intelligence model

SANTO DOMINGO, DN, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, February 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Dominican Republic achieved first place in the cultural benchmark of LatamGPT, the first large-scale language model developed from and for Latin America. The country scored 16.2% in the cultural evaluation, surpassing Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile among thirteen participating nations.

LatamGPT is an open-source model with seventy billion parameters, developed by Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) together with more than sixty-five public, academic, and technology institutions across the region. It was trained on a corpus of approximately three hundred billion tokens of Latin American content, with the purpose of correcting a structural bias: global artificial intelligence models contain only between 2% and 3% of contextual information about Latin America, limiting their cultural, historical, and linguistic accuracy when responding to queries about the region.

The official launch, held at TVN studios in Santiago de Chile in the presence of President Gabriel Boric, included participation from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the Data Observatory, among other stakeholders. The Dominican delegation, represented by executives from Tabuga and CDN 37, attended the event that its leaders have described as the beginning of a Latin American path for artificial intelligence development, grounded in three principles: technological sovereignty, regional collaboration, and openness.

The Dominican Republic's Role in Building the Model

Dominican participation in LatamGPT was made possible through a collaborative framework organized since 2025 by Tabuga, a digital consultancy and enterprise technology firm based in Santo Domingo. In April of that year, Tabuga formalized a strategic alliance with CENIA, becoming the official representative of the Chilean center's artificial intelligence services in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. Through this agreement, the firm assumed an active role in adapting AI solutions to the local environment and contributing data for training the model.

The alliance was strengthened in July with the integration of CDN Channel 37 as a provider of Dominican news and cultural content. This marked a milestone: it was the first time a Dominican private company supplied national data for a large-scale regional language model.

The cultural benchmark result reflects the systematic incorporation of Dominican historical, cultural, and informational content, including references to national identity, geography, historical processes, and cultural expressions. This additional effort was made possible by local patrons committed to the digitization of the national cultural heritage.

Among the reference sources used to build Dominican cultural knowledge entries are publications edited by Banco Popular Dominicano, including El gran cambio: La transformación social y económica de la República Dominicana 1963–2013, by Frank Moya Pons; Taínos, arte y sociedad, by Manuel A. García Arévalo; Ecos de la Costa: Travesía por el litoral marino dominicano, by Domingo Marte; Turismo dominicano: 30 años a velocidad de crucero, by Pedro Delgado Malagón; and Patrimonio Nacional: Joyas dominicanas de la cultura y la naturaleza. From these works, question-and-answer sets were developed covering topics ranging from historical and socioeconomic processes to the country's natural, pre-Columbian, and tourism heritage.

Regional Impact and Scope of the Model

LatamGPT addresses a documented need. According to CENIA studies, when comparing the performance of models such as GPT, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Gemma on questions about Latin American entities versus entities from other regions, all show a significant imbalance: they know substantially less about Latin America than about other parts of the world.

The regional model seeks to close that gap through training concentrated on the region's cultural, linguistic, and thematic diversity, with data balanced by country and by domain—politics, economics, arts, sciences, among others.

The model will be distributed openly along with its training code, data governance protocols, and evaluation benchmarks. This commitment to comprehensive transparency—going beyond publishing the model itself—stands as one of the initiative's distinguishing features compared to other open-source projects worldwide.

Tabuga and the Expansion of a Regional Perspective

For Tabuga, Dominican leadership in the LatamGPT cultural benchmark confirms the viability of its regional growth model. The firm, which maintains strategic regional and international alliances and distributes solutions across five Latin American countries, has oriented its strategy toward building bridges between regional technological innovation and local productive ecosystems.

"LatamGPT will help preserve Dominican culture and, at the same time, drive digital adoption and close the technological gap in our region," said Arturo López Valerio, technology entrepreneur and founder of Tabuga. Participation in this initiative is part of a broader vision: that the Dominican Republic move beyond technology consumption to become an active participant in building artificial intelligence infrastructure with cultural relevance and strategic significance for the region.

About LatamGPT

LatamGPT is an open-source project coordinated by Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), available to developers, institutions, and entrepreneurs seeking to build solutions with a Latin American focus.

About Tabuga

A digital consultancy based in the Dominican Republic that leverages knowledge, intelligence, and technology to guide organizations toward more competitive and intelligent business models. Its purpose combines five business units with analytical rigor and regional vision to drive enterprise leadership. Founded in 2011 by technology entrepreneur Arturo López Valerio, the firm serves industry leaders across multiple Ibero-American markets.

Isaac Garcia
Tabuga
igarcia@tabuga.com
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