YTL AI Labs has showcased ILMU at ASEAN AI Malaysia Summit 2025 that’s happening at MITEC. This is Malaysia’s very own Large Language Model (LLM) that’s 100% Made in Malaysia by Malaysians for Malaysians.
Why Malaysia needs its own AI model?
Besides being trained on local language and data to understand Malaysian culture, context and daily realities, the localised AI model is fully developed, owned and operated in Malaysia. The main emphasis is AI sovereignty, ensuring that we maintain ownership and control over systems that we rely to guide us.
In case you’re wondering, ILMU stands for Intelek Luhur Malaysia Untukmu.
- Intelek (Intellect): ILMU is built to be intelligent-capable of learning and generating insightful and context-aware responses.
- Luhur (Integrity): ensuring ILMU is guided by strong principles of ethics, integrity and safety.
- Malaysia: Developed in Malaysia and built to support Malaysians and serve the nation.
- Untukmu (for you): Made for all Malaysians, designed to be accessible, useful and relevant to everyday needs.
YTL AI Labs believe that ASEAN shouldn’t just be users of AI but we should we builders of AI. As AI advances, we should guard and guide our own AI to preserve our national identities.
Behind ILMU is a Full Stack AI investment which covers local data centre infrastructure and AI cloud infrastructure in partnership with Nvidia.
For AI to thrive, there’s also the need to build the AI ecosystem. At the moment, ILMU has already formed partnerships with over 10 partners and the list is expected to grow. Some of its current partners include Aco Tech, Carsome, Ryt Bank, Astro, Swipey, Vision.Machina, MediaPrima, Yes 5G, Vistel and TeeniAi.
ILMU provides world class performance with local intelligence
ILMU is fully multimodal by design and it can understand and respond through text, voice and even vision. Unlike other global based LLM, ILMU boasts superior understanding of Bahasa Melayu including dialects such as Kelantanese.
During its initial 0.1 release, ILMU is already capable of passing PT3 and SPM exams in Bahasa Melayu with an A grade.
When tested against Malay MMLU, the first Bahasa Melayu multitask benchmark, ILMU comes up on top beating DeepSeek V3, GPT-4o and even the latest GPT-5. In terms of performance, ILMU is said to be on par with leading frontier models such as GPT-4o and Llama 3.1 across key benchmarks.
During the summit, we get to see ILMUchat in action and it is capable of understanding English, Malay and even our rojak language impressively well. Whether it is asking for Nasi Lemak restaurant recommendations in KL or asking for travel recommendations in specific Malaysian towns, ILMU is able to provide proper responses based on our local context and preference.
A standout strength of ILMU is its understanding of local context. For instance, when asked about health-related topics like medical marijuana usage, it offers answers highlighting local legality, medical exceptions, and prohibitions under Malaysian law. As a result, you’re getting answers that’s relevant, context-aware and aligned with Malaysian values.
If you need help to write a formal letter or speech for a government event, ILMU can also assist you with the draft with the proper format including salutations. Depending on the occasion or a little bit of run, ILMU can speak from your local Mamak slang to even Bahasa Istana.
These ILMU intelligent features can also be found in other demos which include the in-car AI assistant developed in partnership with ACOTech
Using AI to generate images isn’t new but ILMU is able to generate images in a very familiar Malaysian-style theme. You can check out the sample ILMU generated artwork at the AI summit.
ILMU API available for business, ILMUchat to go live on Malaysia Day
At the moment, ILMU is now available for business and its API access is now available to integrate into your current workflows.
There’s also an ILMU Accelerator Programme provided in partnership with MDEC. USD 1 million ILMU tokens will be given for startups and companies, and MDEC will facilitate with Malaysia Digital status application status and talent passes.
For the general public, ILMU Chat will be available for early access on Malaysia Day, 16th September 2025. To be among the first to use it, you can register your interest online.
ILMU: 100% Malaysian made AI model, ILMUchat available for early access on 16 September
News Reports PH
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