Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, today launched ILMU by YTL AI Labs, Malaysia’s first multimodal large language model (LLM), at the ASEAN AI Malaysia Summit 2025.
Built entirely in Malaysia to serve Malaysian needs, the application was developed by YTL AI Labs in collaboration with Universiti Malaya. The model marks a major leap in the nation’s AI aspirations— combining local intelligence and languages with best-in-class performance.
YTL said ILMU — short for Intelek Luhur Malaysia Untukmu — is a multimodal AI model that can process and generate not just text, but also voice and images, and is ready to support real-world applications across sectors. The name reflects the model’s core values: ‘Intelek’, for context-aware intelligence; ‘Luhur’, for ethical foundations rooted in Malaysian values; ‘Malaysia’, for cultural and linguistic fluency; and ‘Untukmu’, because it is built to serve all Malaysians.
This is more than just technology — it is a step toward empowering our people, our businesses, and our nation in the digital era,” said YB Gobind Singh Deo, Minister of Digital.
According to YTL, ILMU performs on par with state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Llama 3.1. ILMU achieves the highest score among all frontier models in Bahasa Melayu language understanding (MalayMMLU – a test of multi-domain knowledge in Malay), demonstrates stronger performance on real-world prompts than Llama 3.1 (Arena Hard Auto – an interactive evaluation of practical problem-solving), and matches GPT-4o’s results on complex instruction-following tasks (IFEval – a measure of how accurately AI follows nuanced, multi-step instructions).
At the time of launch, YTL AI Labs’ lineup of partners included Aco Tech, Ryt Bank, Astro, Media Prima, Yes, Carsome, Swipey, Vision Machina, Vistel, TeeniAI, TrustAI and Mesolitica,
