Te Hiku Media chief executive Peter-Lucas Jones. Photo: Supplied
The chief executive of a Māori media company hopes to influence native leaders in the AI space when he travels to the United States next week.
Peter-Lucas Jones was named in the TIME100 AI list of 2024 for his work around preserving te reo Māori through AI technology.
The list includes some of the biggest tech billionaires across the world, including Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Te Hiku Media, which is based in Kaitāia, has reached a 92 percent accuracy rate with its speech to text model - the best in the world.
Jones will be travelling to San Fransisco on Friday to join the TIME magazine 100 AI list.
He said he was humbled his company's mahi would be recognised, and wanted to inspire others to understand how solutions needed to come from indigenous communities.
"In doing so we are able to raise to the attention how indigenous communities like the one that I come from, don't only want to be the users of technology, we want to be the developers of it too. And that way we're not only just creating tools that serve one purpose."
Jones said that would help other indigenous groups to contribute to a space mainly dominated by non-indigenous people.
Te Hiku Media's automatic speech recognition model for te reo Māori was built on 30 years worth of archival footage and requested audio clips from community members.
Jones said indigenous data sovereignty was important to maintain identity in the digital landscape.
"When we think about the ownership of data, when we think about intellectual property rights, data is like land. When we think about land alienation for Māori people and indigenous people throughout the world, language loss and culture decline, we can learn something."
Te Hiku has worked with RNZ and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to provide better te reo Māori transcripts.