This week the institute hosted three welcome guests from New Zealand who work with the Māori language: Hēmi Kelly, lecturer at Auckland University of Technology; Vincent Olsen-Reeder, lecturer in te reo Māori at Victoria University, who specializes in sociolinguistics and language revitalization; and Whetu Paitai, director of Piki Studio. New Zealanders have shown great interest in building on Iceland’s official policy on language technology and the methodology used to devise the policy on language technology over the last four years — including a fortuitous collaboration with OpenAI in recent months. The primary objective of partnering with OpenAI, for the company’s part, was devising an interface to enable the inclusion of “smaller” languages in the GPT-4 model. A group from OpenAI is currently considering working with New Zealand to incorporate the Māori language.

Pictured here, in addition to the guests from abroad, are Jóhanna Vigdís Gudmundsdóttir, executive director of Almannarómur; Gudrún Nordal, director of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies; Steinthór Steingrímsson, project manager in language technology; Assistant Research Professor Einar Freyr Sigurdsson and Research Professor Gísli Sigurdsson. The guests learned about the institute's diverse language technology program and also got a primer on the written culture and ways of thinking that characterize medieval Iceland.