If you read the news about technology, you might know about the latest development of ILMU. ILMU is an artificial intelligence (AI) that is trained on Malaysia’s local languages and data to understand local culture, context, and daily realities. Click https://www.ytlailabs.com/ to understand more.
YTL launches ILMU (photo by The Edge Malaysia)
Malaysia is steadily stepping into the forefront of AI
The ILMU performance (Photo from https://www.ytlailabs.com/)
What can we learn around ILMU?
Firstly, ILMU stands for Intelek Luhur Malaysia Untukmu, meaning “Noble Intelligence of Malaysia, For You.” It is developed by YTL AI Labs in collaboration with Universiti Malaya, fully conceived, built, and hosted in Malaysia. In addition, ILMU is a multimodal large language model (LLM) capable of understanding and generating text, voice, and images. It is designed to understand Bahasa Malaysia, Manglish (Malaysian English), and local dialects like Kelate. This cultural intelligence ensures that AI solutions resonate with local communities, making technology more inclusive, accessible, and relevant to everyday Malaysian life.
Moreover, ILMU’s performance on language, STEM, humanities, social sciences, and others are performing on par with or better than the leading models across global benchmark. Meanwhile, STEM means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Based on this performance comparison, we learn that a “good” AI technology or robot needs to equip these requirements – language, STEM, humanities, social sciences, and others. In the end, the users of AI are humans. People use language for communication, while STEM lets people to solve tasks with computational thinking every day.
Beyond its linguistic strengths, ILMU represents a strategic investment in national capability. By hosting the model locally and integrating it into sectors such as education, healthcare, and small business support, Malaysia is ensuring that the benefits of AI remain within its borders. This approach safeguards data sovereignty while fostering an innovation ecosystem that can compete and collaborate with others on the world stage.
Over time, Malaysia is steadily advancing into the era of AI, harnessing innovation to drive progress across education, business, and governance. The launch of ILMU, the nation’s first home-grown multimodal AI, marks a bold step toward digital sovereignty. It means Malaysia is empowering local industries, preserving cultural identity, and positioning the country as a competitive force in the global AI landscape.
If you think that AI does not related to you, you could be wrong? This is because we are now living in the technology driven world, and we cannot live without technologies anymore.
Sources:
- Futu Bull Futubull
- Malay Mail Malay Mail
- The Edge Malaysia https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/766252
