Which language model performs best in Basque?
The Latxa model was an important milestone for artificial intelligence in the Basque language. Until then, we had no open-weight model that handled Basque decently. Since then, several others have been created specifically fine-tuned for Basque: Kimu (Orai) and the Latxa Qwen3 VL family of models recently released by HiTZ. At the same time, new top-tier local models have been emerging — Qwen, Gemma, etc. — which can be especially interesting for use in agents with external tools. These models are also improving their Basque language capabilities noticeably. But do they match the Latxa model? ...