Intel and World Wide Technology deliver offline AI learning to students in Guatemala

Intel and World Wide Technology, one of Intel’s largest data centre partners, have together launched an initiative to bring offline AI education tools to students in Guatemala, targeting communities without reliable internet access.

Students at Esperanza Juvenil, a nonprofit school and residential program in Guatemala City, have received Dell laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra processors. The devices are equipped with on-device AI capabilities, and feature a central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and neural processing unit (NPU) that allow AI tasks to run without internet connectivity.

According to Intel, each laptop includes an offline large language model (LLM) tutor, which was developed by World Wide Technology. The AI tutor can help students improve their Spanish, learn English and maths, and ask educational questions. Teachers can also analyse chat logs to gain insights into students’ interests and performance, so they can create and tailor lesson plans accordingly.

“These are children who learn to overcome many challenges, who are eager to change their story and their family history through quality education,” said Esperanza Juvenil Director General Susana Rios.

Meet your AI tutor

Intel highlighted the AI tutor has also been adapted to reflect Guatemalan cultural and linguistic contexts.

“Imagine a more personalized, nuanced AI that has been made for Guatemala, that’s been tuned and adapted, that knows the cultural variances of Guatemala in order to be able to better answer some of the regional questions that these students may have,” said Intel AI Product Marketing Engineer Bharath Srivats.

“All of this power is now portable and can be brought on device – AI on the go.”

Given that the solution is open-sourced and has been designed to be scalable and affordable, Intel and World Wide Technology announced they also plan to expand these donations to schools in India, Africa and South America.

“Our goal really is to democratize technology so that students and school kids anywhere around the world can have access to leading-edge artificial intelligence applications,” said Bob Olwig, Executive VP of World Wide Technology.

“We’re really proving out architecturally how Intel’s technology can support running LLMs at the edge, which is super exciting.”

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