KARACHI (Kashmir English): Pakistan has reached a notable landmark in technology with the beta launch of Zahanat AI, the country’s first locally developed AI chatbot.
Mehwish Salman Ali, an entrepreneur, is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Data Vault, a company that developed Zahanat AI to help resolve Pakistan’s unique issues in culturally relevant and locally appropriate ways.
The platform was the result of multiple years of development and has been operating out of a dedicated data center in Karachi since late 2022 so that the data used by the AI model stays in Pakistan without being transferred to another country.
The data center is equipped with a significant amount of bandwidth for high-speed internet and DDoS protection, using a mixed GPU architecture to process data, utilizing both Nvidia GPUs and chips. According to the owners of Zahanat AI, development costs were relatively low for this product.
The owners also mentioned that the development of another project sought to look and sound similar to Zahanat AI and cost $5 million to develop, whereas Zahanat AI cost less.
Although exact amounts were not indicated, the owners stated that the goal behind Zahanat AI was to develop an AI specifically trained to understand and respond to the needs of Pakistan that was programmed using a dataset of over 2 billion parameters, including the training, storage, and processing all occurring in Pakistan.
One of the most important features of Zahanat AI is the design, with an eye toward ethically responsible AI development such that sensitive and controversial topics have been filtered and, therefore, avoided, concerning some individuals.
The beta rollout is currently invite-only, meaning users need to submit their email and personal information to gain access.
The controlled admissions process will allow the developers to get useful feedback and develop the platform before an eventual public release.
The developers claim that Zahanat AI will develop solutions focused on all of Pakistan’s diverse problems after training using the data from the country.
The developers think its the technology behind Zahanat AI will change everything from education and health to business and governance to all sectors.
The first iteration of the Z1 model has been released, and they reportedly plan to continue improving and expanding with a Z2 model that will allow for multiple languages and voice input.
