Cibersociedad Congress Debates the Reach and Challenges of AI

The 4th Digital Transformation Congress, Cibersociedad 2025, running until October 9 at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, dedicated today's session to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The event featured several presentations, including one on CecilIA, a Cuban Language Model, introduced by specialists from the University of Havana (UH).

Yudivián Almeida Cruz, a professor at the UH's Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, explained the evolution of large language models like ChatGPT. He detailed that these models are limited by their computational capacities, despite giving the impression of having "memory."

He specified that there are many ways to address this, such as creating an external memory for them, which presents its own challenges. He called for developing models that specifically focus on the elimination of biases.

Professor Almeida Cruz pointed out that creating a language model requires not only AI specialists but also experts from all fields of computing. It also demands specialized, expensive hardware and significant energy resources.

He insisted on the possibility of creating smaller models which, despite having limited capacity, are more affordable. The development of a national model is necessary, he emphasized, highlighting estimates that by 2030, 50 percent of children will use language models in their digital interactions.

"A behavior that will lead them to learn to communicate under the codes of these AIs, which brings new communication challenges," he noted.

In this sense, they are promoting the idea of creating a Cuban language model, based on pre-existing models rather than starting from scratch, such as Salamandra, which was used to create CecilIA—a project that pays homage to Cirilo Villaverde's novel of the same name.

Also featured in the Cibersociedad program was a panel on the AI that Cuba needs, with distinguished speakers including experts from several of the country's higher education institutions, the Technological University of Havana, Datys, and Avangenio.

Tuesday's agenda included a session on Smart Cities and digital twins, plus a conference on Digital Heritage and AI by Pedro Ortega Ventureira, Technical Advisor for Culture, Tourism, and Sports for the Madrid City Council. This was followed by another presentation on Smart Cities and Urban Digital Twins, sharing the experience of Ernesto Faubel Cubells, Head of Smart City and Data Management Services for the Valencia City Council, Spain.

The academic exchanges also concentrated on the presentation of practical case studies on smart cities in Cuba, with participants from the Union of Computer Scientists, the Matanzas Scientific-Technological Park, ETECSA, and the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana.

The topics covered range from the experiences of heritage sites in Old Havana to the presentation of Varadero as a Digital City, environmental monitoring in the Cuban capital through the Internet of Things, and Smart Cities with a PaaS (Platform as a Service) approach.

The multitude of issues examined in this Digital Transformation Congress is further demonstrated by the ERP workshop coordinated by the Business Group of Informatics and Communications (GEIC). Under the motto From Operational Necessity to Strategic Impulse, the forum delves into topics related to the challenges of this type of technology and its impact on the Cuban business sector.

ERP is a category of business management software—a suite of integrated applications that an organization can use to collect, store, manage, and interpret data from many business activities.