Indonesia's Indosat, GoTo launch local language AI model

Indonesia's telecommunication company Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and its biggest tech company GoTo Gojek Tokopedia launched on Thursday the development of Sahabat-AI, a large language model ecosystem in Indonesian languages.

Sahabat-AI would enable Indonesians to build artificial intelligence-based services and applications in Bahasa Indonesia and various other local languages, with the understanding of local context, the companies said in a joint statement.

It is supported by AI Singapore and India's Tech Mahindra, which used Nvidia AI Enterprise software including Nvidia NeMo to train the model and enhance its general language understanding, according to the statement. Several universities and media groups will contribute to optimise it for local context and cultural relevance, it added.


The Sahabat-AI model, trained using Nvidia's full-stack AI platform, would launch with 8-billion and 9-billion parameter large language models in its first phase.

Indonesia's AI industry has attracted burgeoning interest, with companies such as Microsoft pledging to build data centres there.