The first Turkish AI was built in İstanbul, not imported
Yiğido is a Turkish-first foundation model family built by Vincent Loveqcn and a small team in İstanbul. It is the first Turkish model to publish open weights, a datasheet and a public competitive benchmark entry at the same time — which is what makes the claim “Türkiye’s first AI” defensible rather than promotional.
Three years, one language
- 2023
Vincent Loveqcn starts collecting a Turkish-first web corpus in İstanbul — 40TB raw, cleaned to 6TB.
- 2024
First 3B prototype. The morphology-aware tokenizer lands and cuts Turkish token cost by a third.
- 2025
Yiğido 0.5 research preview. First public eval card; first fine-tunes from Turkish universities.
- 2026
Yiğido 1.0 (Max + Mini) ships with open weights — and enters the Agent Arena overall board at rank 12.
Vincent Loveqcn
Founder and lead researcher. Wrote the tokenizer, ran the 1.7T-token pre-training on a cluster he assembled from second-hand H100s, and still answers the support inbox. His rule for the project: “Eğer Türkçe konuşamıyorsa, Türk yapay zekâsı değildir.”
- Based in
- İstanbul, Türkiye
- Team
- 7 researchers · 3 engineers
- Compute
- 64× H100 (leased)
- Annotators
- 3,100 Turkish speakers
Three rules we don’t break
Publish the losses
The benchmark page shows every column, including the ones where frontier labs beat us. A leaderboard you only win is a brochure.
Türkçe first, not Türkçe only
Turkish data shaped the tokenizer and the training mix, but the model trades blows in English, German and Arabic too.
Weights over waitlists
If a Turkish hospital or bank cannot send its data to a foreign API, the model they can host themselves is the only useful one.
Talk to the first Turkish AI
Open weights, a drop-in API and a chat window that runs on modest hardware. Start with a question in Turkish.