Veon made progress with work to develop local large language models (LLMs), launching an open-source edition for the Kazakh language as part of a push to introduce more AI-powered tools to the country.

Developed by Veon subsidiaries Beeline Kazakhstan and Qazcode in collaboration with the Kazakh government and Nazarbayev University, the Kaz-LLM offering is capable of interacting in Kazakh, Turkish, English and Russian.

It was developed through 150 billion tokens, which were collected, curated, synthesised and translated, and was published on the Hugging Face AI development platform, Veon stated.

Veon explained Qazcode is the only private sector partner involved in the initiative, aligning with its mission to provide “speakers of low-resource languages with augmented intelligence tools” to enhance daily lives.

The announcement builds on a recent launch of an initiative to develop Pakistan’s first indigenous LLM, focused on the Urdu language, as well as work with the Barcelona Supercomputing centre to introduce a Catalan-language offering.

Veon CEO Kaan Terzioglu said while artificial and augmented intelligence have the potential to transform a range of areas, the technology has “bias towards high-resource languages with greater digital representation”.

“Operating in markets where national languages are not rich in digital research libraries, Veon is uniquely positioned to bridge this linguistic gap, ensuring that the half a billion people in our markets enjoy equal opportunities in the digital age.”