51吃瓜

At the heart of Kazakhstan’s academic and technological revolution sits the Institute of Smart

Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at Nazarbayev University. As the country’s premier AI research organisation, the ISSAI drives digital infrastructure and technological sovereignty, enhancing Kazakhstan’s role in the global AI landscape.

In November 2024, the ISSAI launched the Soyle app, a multifunctional application for speech recognition, voice synthesis and text and speech translation across Kazakh, Russian, English and Turkish. According to the Facebook Low Resource Machine Translation Benchmark, its translation quality surpasses that of Google Translate, Yandex Translate, and GPT-4o.

In December 2024, ISSAI presented Kazakhstan’s first large language model (LLM), KAZ-LLM. Supporting Kazakh, Russian, English and Turkish, ISSAI KAZ-LLM enables Kazakh language translation, content creation and large-scale text processing. It has received widespread acclaim, including praise from Turing Award laureate and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun during the AI Action Summit in Paris.

“This model reflects Kazakhstan’s commitment to innovation, autonomy and the growth of its technological ecosystem. Our team prepared two versions of ISSAI KAZ-LLM – 8 billion and 70 billion parameters – based on Meta’s Llama architecture and optimised for high-performance systems and resource-constrained environments,” says Hüseyin Atakan Varol, director of the ISSAI. “Developers will be able to download and run our model on both sophisticated servers and laptops.”

The rapid pace of AI development continues to accelerate at a breakneck rate, reshaping global technological landscapes. The ISSAI makes an invaluable contribution to Kazakhstan’s position as an active participant in this transformative race. The development of ISSAI KAZ-LLM is a crucial step in advancing AI in Kazakhstan and the wider region. Moreover, it fosters the growth of a highly skilled local workforce, forming a powerful human capital of AI specialists.

Building on the knowledge gained in the KAZ-LLM project, in January 2025, the ISSAI introduced Oylan, a groundbreaking vision-language model that can process images and text in Kazakh, Russian and English. Oylan was trained on the largest dataset ever developed in Kazakhstan, containing over 10 million images and 50 million question-answer pairs.

To address the absence of supercomputers in Kazakhstan, the ISSAI developed the Mangitas 01 inference server – the ISSAI’s own solution for data processing and AI. Built from commercial off-the-shelf components, it enables local deployment of generative AI models like the Soyle app.

This server delivers high-performance speech recognition, translation and generation for environments without large-scale computing infrastructure.

The ISSAI’s achievements underscore Nazarbayev University’s emergence as a world-class research university. The ISSAI assembled a top team of Kazakhstani specialists to deliver projects of national importance. As Nazarbayev University celebrates its 15th anniversary, it continues expanding its footprint in AI and data-related fields.

The university has recently launched a master’s in applied artificial intelligence and data science at the School of Engineering and Digital Sciences. This programme is designed to meet the growing demand for AI and data experts – currently the university’s most sought-after academic direction – further positioning Nazarbayev University as Central Asia’s leading academic hub for AI.