Turkey unveils its model of Thinking Artificial Intelligence (Bilga)

Turkey officially announced on Saturday, June 13, the launch of its local language model for artificial intelligence "Bilge", which was presented to the public and companies under the slogan "Thinking Artificial Intelligence for Turkey" during the Turkey AI Summit in Istanbul.

Turkish circles described the model as a "central step" in Ankara's path towards strengthening its digital sovereignty and developing an independent national infrastructure in the field of artificial intelligence.

Official sources in Ankara  said Bilge is based on a full local training, with Turkish engineers providing it with billions of pages of documented data with the aim of ensuring an accurate linguistic and cultural representation of the Turkish language away from the biases common in Western models.

The launch of the model coincided with Turkish President  Recep Tayyip Erdogan's announcement of a comprehensive national action plan within Vision 2026, which includes a broad program to qualify competencies that includes the training of 10,000 engineers and experts in artificial intelligence research and the preparation of 100,000 specialists in commercial applications.

The plan includes launching digital literacy programs aimed at empowering 5 million people in Turkey's 81 states, as well as allocating at least 2% of government investment budgets to support startups in the sector.

As part of the development environment, the government announced the availability of the National Data Library, which includes more than 2,000 public datasets, with the aim of facilitating research and enabling young developers to build innovative applications based on local AI.

Turkey's Minister of Industry and Technology celebrates Bilga

The summit witnessed a direct test of the capabilities of the model, through an interactive dialogue between the Minister of Industry and Technology, Mehmet Fatih Kacir, during which the latter provided an immediate analysis of Turkey's economic strengths, especially in the youth and defense industries sectors.

In a post on his social media account, the Turkish minister described "Bilga" as "Turkey's thinking artificial intelligence" and published a clip that included a dialogue between him and Bilga. 

In his interview, the minister said: "Hello Bilge, I am Mehmet Fatih Qajar, Minister of Industry and Technology," to which Bilge replied: "Hello Mr. Minister, I am very happy to get to know you. How can I help you?"

When asked by Kacir, "The team that developed you says that you are a local and national AI model for Turkey. How do you know yourself?" Bilge replied: I am a local and national AI assistant developed to meet the needs of Turkey. I am here to provide you and all users with the most accurate information in the most realistic way."

The Turkish government will soon bring Bilga into the business

Ankara is accelerating its steps to integrate the Bilge AI model into four key sectors, as part of a government plan aimed at raising efficiency and enhancing technical sovereignty. The defense sector is at the forefront of these areas, where the model is used to analyze drone and sensor data and predict military failures to increase equipment readiness. In digital government services, the e-Devlet portal is preparing  to adopt Bilge as a virtual assistant that guides citizens and speeds up archiving and indexing of documents.

The health sector is also preparing to integrate the model into government hospitals to support medical diagnosis and the organization of appointments and prescriptions, while Turkish factories in the smart manufacturing sector are turning to use it for supply chain management, demand forecasting, and quality control via computer vision systems. With these steps, Turkey is putting Bilga at the center of its next digital transformation.