On January 11, 2025, the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) had the honor of welcoming Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, one of China’s leading venture capital companies and a global expert in AI.
The visit started with a welcome speech by ISSAI Founding Director, Prof. Atakan Varol, who introduced key attendees of the meeting, including Nazarbayev University President Prof. Waqar Ahmad, Vice Minister of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan Ms. Dinara Chsheglova, NU Vice President Darkhan Bilyalov, ISSAI Executive Director Yerbol Absalyamov, and ISSAI Deputy Director of External Affairs and Product Madina Abdrakhmanova.
Madina Abdrakhmanova presented ISSAI’s major research areas and key projects. She outlined ISSAI’s pivotal role in advancing AI in Kazakhstan, highlighting speech and natural language processing technologies for the Kazakh language, along with significant progress in fields such as computer vision, augmented reality, and virtual reality. One of the highlights was ISSAI’s first commercial AI product the Soyle App a multifunctional application for speech recognition, voice synthesis, and text and speech translation into four Kazakh, Russian, English, and Turkish languages. Madina demonstrated the Soyle App’s translation performance and emphasized its contribution to the development of the Kazakh language and other regional languages. She also demonstrated a live demo of the Soyle App to Dr. Lee. Following this, Madina introduced Aibike, a photo-realistic digital avatar that interacts in Kazakh, developed by the ISSAI team of researchers. Her presentation then focused on the ISSAI Kaz-LLM project, where she detailed how ISSAI successfully developed and trained large language models with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters. Yerbol Absalyamov provided a demonstration of the Kaz-LLM to conclude the meeting.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee was highly impressed by the quality of ISSAI’s projects, acknowledging the complexity of data collection and development involved. He praised the team for their accomplishments and engaged in a productive discussion about future collaboration opportunities. Dr. Lee concluded his visit by wishing ISSAI continued success.