Malaysia’s current government has made it pretty clear that the nation intends to lead the region with its AI efforts, and it has just officiated the launch of its locally-made large language model (LLM), called ILMU. The word means “knowledge” in Malay, but the name is actually an acronym of Intelek Luhur Malaysia Untukmu, or “Noble Intelligence of Malaysia for you.”
ILMUchat Set To Serve Malaysians
Specifically, the chatbot itself that most people will see during conversations will be called ILMUchat; the model is developed by local company YTL AI Labs, a subsidiary of YTL Group. The world already seen a huge number of LLMs on the market – with ChatGPT enjoying the majority of market share – so what’s the reason of developing our own? To put it simply, ILMUchat is designed to better understand local contexts or languages, and to establish sovereignty on AI, which is a pretty big deal in today’s geopolitics.
For example, ‘Georgetown’ is the Penang’s state capital, but there are tons of cities around the word sharing the same name. In this case, ILMUchat knows the Georgetown you’re looking for is the one located in the state of Penang, not the ones in other parts of the world (fun fact, here’s the full list). This LLM also specializes in Malay language, and it’s even capable of understanding dialects like Kelantanese Malay; besides that, it has no problem dealing with mixed languages that we call “rojak” as well.
Having a locally-made model also allows local organizations to utilize them while ensuring full local regulatory compliance (and also lessens the geopolitical risks). As of today, there are a few big names in partnership with ILMU, including YTL subsidiaries Ryt Bank and Yes, along with external organizations like Astro, Media Prima, Carsome, and more. As a matter of fact, it’s no slouch either – YTL claims ILMU’s capabilities are on par or better than the likes of GPT-4o, GPT-5, Llama 3.1, and Deepseek-V3.
For its initial, early-access release come this September 16 (Malaysia Day), the model will only work in text forms, though the company intends to expand this with multimodel capabilities, including voice and image. If you’re interested, you can register your access on its website ilmu.ai to try it out.
Pokdepinion: Safe to say the hardware behind it all is probably a green one.
