AI & ML interests
Caravela Labs is the research arm of Caravela, a Belgian AI & automation consultancy founded by a Portuguese engineer. We build and openly release European Portuguese (pt-PT) language models — trained by one person on a single consumer GPU, evaluated on public, reproducible benchmarks.
Recent Activity
⚓️ Caravela Labs
The open-research arm of Caravela — a Belgian AI & automation consultancy founded by a Portuguese engineer.
We build and openly release language models for European Portuguese (pt-PT) — trained by one person on a single consumer GPU, and evaluated exclusively on public, reproducible benchmarks using official harnesses. No private eval sauce: every number we publish can be rerun by anyone.
What we believe
- 🇵🇹 European Portuguese deserves first-class models. pt-PT is chronically under-served — treated as a dialect of pt-BR by most open models. We build for it specifically.
- 🔓 Open and reproducible, or it didn't happen. Open weights, open eval scripts, official benchmark harnesses (lm-eval-harness, EvalPlus, ALBA, and more).
- 🛠️ Judgment over budget. Careful base-model selection, data quality, and disciplined fine-tuning on consumer hardware — proof that frontier-adjacent results don't require frontier budgets.
Current work
Adamastor — an open 9B model for European Portuguese. Coming soon.
About Caravela
Caravela is an AI & automation consultancy based in Wallonia, Belgium (Mont-Saint-Guibert), delivering practical, on-premise, EU AI Act-compliant AI to SMEs. Caravela Labs is its research arm — the consulting practice funds the lab; the lab keeps the practice sharp.
The name: a nod to the Portuguese caravela — a small, sea-worthy ship that charted new routes through uncertain waters. A working vessel, not a cruise liner.
🔗 caravela.tech · GitHub · X