Whānau, hapū AI and Māori large language models - Tikanga in Technology
Large language models that actually know their pepeha - Māori LLMs grounded in tikanga, not scraped from the void.
Key takeaway sovereign, community-built AI is how te reo stays te reo.
From the Tikanga in Technology Summit at the University of Waikato, a session on building whānau- and hapū-centred AI and Māori large language models - models grounded in tikanga and community ownership rather than scraped indiscriminately from the web.
The stakes are data sovereignty and cultural integrity: who builds the models that speak te reo, and on whose terms. For Aotearoa, community-built, tikanga-led AI is the difference between te reo being represented on its own terms and being flattened into a generic dataset.
“Large language models that actually know their pepeha - sovereign, community-built, and long overdue.” — The Veteran Critic, The 6 O’Clock News