On May 23, 2025, Nazarbayev University and the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) welcomed a delegation from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, led by Mr. Ibrahim Neyaz, CEO of the National Technology Development Program (NTDP). The visit highlighted Kazakhstan’s fast-growing AI ecosystem and potential for global collaboration.
The delegation included representatives from NTDP, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, White Hill Capital, and SparkLabs Group. During a showcase in the Upper Atrium, Dr. Atakan Varol, Founding Director of ISSAI, presented the institute’s flagship projects:
- KazLLM – Kazakhstan’s first large language model, optimized for Kazakh, Russian, and English. Available in 8B and 70B versions, it is openly released for non-commercial research.
- Oylan2 – A powerful AI model that understands and processes text, images, and audio in multiple languages, supporting tasks in education, accessibility, and reasoning.
- SoyleApp – A multilingual AI platform offering real-time transcription, voice synthesis, and translation. Designed for both users and businesses, it supports Kazakh, Russian, English, and Turkish.
- SoyleLive (launching June 2025) – A desktop app that generates real-time subtitles from live speech, enhancing accessibility and multilingual communication at public events.
- Beynele (launching June 2025) – A text-to-image generation model that creates culturally-aware visuals from prompts in Kazakh, Russian, and English.
- Mangitas 01 Inference Server – A cost-effective AI deployment server built with off-the-shelf components. It supports high-speed local processing for applications like SoyleApp.
The Saudi delegation expressed great interest in ISSAI’s innovative, inclusive technologies and their cultural relevance. The visit underscored ISSAI’s leadership in AI across Central Asia and its growing role in the global AI landscape.