On August 14, the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) welcomed Ilias Kabden, a founder of AIQalam, an EdTech startup developing a platform designed to automatically grade and assess handwritten school notebooks.
ISSAI was represented by Amina Baikenova, Acting Deputy Director of Product and External Affairs and Ulzhan Alibek, External Affairs Manager.
During the meeting, Ilias Kabden presented the AIQalam platform, demonstrated its capabilities, and shared plans for its future integration into schools in Astana. The participants also discussed potential areas for collaboration between AIQalam and ISSAI.
The discussion identified an opportunity to further enhance the platform by integrating ISSAI’s Qolda models. Qolda is an open-source multimodal AI family designed for efficient on-device inference on laptops and smartphones without relying on high-performance computing infrastructure.
The flagship Qolda model is a 4-billion-parameter language-vision model supporting Kazakh, Russian, and English. It enables multimodal reasoning through image-text alignment, document analysis, and visual question answering. The Qolda family also includes Qolda-AVL, a series of open-source 5B, 9B, and 34B audio-vision-language models capable of processing audio, images, and text in Kazakh, Russian, and English. Qolda-AVL is the first open-source Kazakh language model with audio-processing capabilities.
The Qolda models were developed under the PTF (2024-2026) grant titled “Creation of a Large Language Model (LLM) to Maintain the Implementation of the Kazakh Language and Increase Technological Progress.” The models are open-source and available through ISSAI’s Hugging Face account, providing opportunities for researchers and developers to explore and integrate them into new applications.
The meeting highlighted the potential for collaboration between AI research and the EdTech industry, with the integration of locally developed AI technologies offering opportunities to improve educational solutions for schools in Kazakhstan.