In the photo, the signing of a Memorandum of cooperation in the field of AI projects between QazCode and JSC NIT

Artificial intelligence opens up new business opportunities, but not all users can take full advantage of it. Most AI systems are designed for languages with a high level of resources, such as English, Spanish or Russian, which creates a serious language gap and deprives many, including Kazakhstanis, of access to advanced technologies in their native language, necessary for the development and improvement of life in countries with low-resource languages.

In Kazakhstan, the problem of the language gap in AI is being solved by a scientific working group led by the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence at Nazarbayev University (ISSAI NU). They are working on creating a large KAZ-LLM language model that will cover the key languages for Kazakhstanis: Kazakh, Russian and English, so that everyone can use digital technologies in their native language. This fundamental model will become the basis for the development of local services and products, as it will be published in the public domain.

Beeline Kazakhstan digital operator and its subsidiary IT company QazCode participate as a partner in the creation of the KAZ-LLM national large language model . This is far from the operator's first experience in AI development. So, last year Beeline launched and made publicly available to all developers the Kaz-RoBERTA-conversational model, which is actively used to serve subscribers on digital platforms. It has been downloaded more than three thousand times on the Hugging Face platform.

Such initiatives are especially relevant against the background of the importance of digitalization, which is emphasized by the country's leadership. President Kazakhstan's Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stressed the importance of strengthening the country's digital infrastructure and expressed his willingness to personally oversee the creation of an AI system in Kazakhstan. " A new era is unfolding before our eyes. The impact of AI technology is as revolutionary as the discovery of electricity and the Internet. And the development of AI should be ahead of the needs of IT developers. First of all, it is necessary to increase our computing power," the President said, emphasizing the importance of developing domestic technologies.

Thanks to Beeline Kazakhstan and QazCode , the KAZ-LLM project supervised by ISSAI is provided with the necessary infrastructure. The company provided cloud computing capacity of 8 DGX H 100, which significantly increased the amount of training data and training capabilities of the model. The company also provided the collected open data, and QazCode data scientists joined a joint working group on model training.      

"KAZ-LLM will be able to create content in the languages most relevant to Kazakhstan: Kazakh, Russian and English. The model will play a crucial role in the preservation of the national cultural heritage and will cover the historical context, specialized areas and colloquial data representing Kazakhstan. By adapting generative AI to local needs, KAZ-LLM will demonstrate how national projects can bridge language gaps and contribute to the global AI innovation landscape.

Most importantly, the KAZ-LLM project contributes to the creation of advanced specialists in the field of generative AI. Thanks to a practical approach to data preparation, training and model implementation, Kazakhstan supports a new wave of advanced scientific personnel capable of creating models and tools for generative AI," ISSAI NU commented.

This contribution to the development of the national economy is great KAZ-LLM's language model reflects the strategy of Beeline's "digital operator", as well as the desire to bridge the language gap in AI technologies. For this purpose, the operator has signed A memorandum with the Supercomputer Center of Barcelona, which specializes in the development of AI of different language groups, and also announced the creation of the first in the Central Asia GPU cloud for the development of AI products based on NVIDIA technology.

Today, the company's portfolio includes many successful AI projects for business: video analytics for sales, computer vision, video surveillance in production, marketing solutions and other products.

"Our accumulated experience, knowledge and cooperation with the Supercomputing Center of Barcelona allow us to focus on three key areas. First, it is the creation of a domestic supercomputer for processing large amounts of data and providing access to these computing capacities to specialists of Nazarbayev University for training models. Secondly, we continue to develop the Kazakh language model Kaz-LLM in order to integrate it into the digital space. And finally, we pay special attention to the development of Data Science professionals so that they can successfully work on complex projects and compete in the international IT arena," said Alexey Sharavar, CEO of QazCode.

The development of large language models in such complex projects as KAZ-LLM plays a key role in the formation and training of strong Data Science personnel for Kazakhstan. These specialists not only gain unique experience working with advanced technologies, but also lay the foundation for further progress in the national AI industry.

The joint efforts of Beeline Kazakhstan, QazCode, Nazarbayev University, a consortium of the country's leading universities, as well as the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, not only promote AI technologies in the Kazakh language, but also contribute to the further development of the country's digital economy.