Working with NVIDIA and its partners, Indonesia’s technology leaders have launched an initiative to bring sovereign AI to the nation’s more than 277 million Indonesian speakers.
The collaboration is grounded in a broad public-private partnership that reflects the nation’s concept of “gotong royong,” a term describing a spirit of mutual assistance and community collaboration.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined Indonesia Minster for State-Owned Enterprises Erick Thohir, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) President Director and CEO Vikram Sinha, GoTo CEO Patrick Walujo and other leaders in Jakarta to celebrate the launch of Sahabat-AI.
Sahabat-AI is a collection of open-source Indonesian large language models (LLMs) that local industries, government agencies, universities and research centers can use to create generative AI applications. Built with NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA NIM microservices, the models were launched today at Indonesia AI Day, a conference focused on enabling AI sovereignty and driving AI-driven digital independence in the country.
Built by Indonesians, for Indonesians, Sahabat-AI models understand local contexts and enable people to build generative AI services and applications in Bahasa Indonesian and various local languages. The models form the foundation of a collaborative effort to empower Indonesia through a locally developed, open-source LLM ecosystem.
“Artificial intelligence will democratize technology. It is the great equalizer,” said Huang. “The technology is complicated but the benefit is not.”
“Sahabat-AI is not just a technological achievement, it embodies Indonesia’s vision for a future where digital sovereignty and inclusivity go hand in hand,” Sinha said. “By creating an AI model that speaks our language and reflects our culture, we’re empowering every Indonesian to harness advanced technology’s potential. This initiative is a crucial step toward democratizing AI as a tool for growth, innovation and empowerment across our diverse society.”
To accelerate this initiative, IOH — one of Indonesia’s largest telecom and internet companies — earlier this year launched “GPU Merdeka by Lintasarta,” an NVIDIA-accelerated sovereign AI cloud. The GPU Merdeka cloud service operates at a BDx Indonesia AI data center powered by renewable energy.
Bolstered by the NVIDIA Cloud Partner program, IOH subsidiary Lintasarta built the high-performance AI cloud in less than three months, a feat that would’ve taken much longer without NVIDIA’s technology infrastructure. The AI cloud is now driving transformation across energy, financial services, healthcare and other industries.
The NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) program provides Lintasarta with access to NVIDIA reference architectures — blueprints for building high-performance, scalable and secure data centers.
The program also offers technological and go-to-market support, access to the latest NVIDIA AI software and accelerated computing platforms, and opportunities to collaborate with NVIDIA’s extensive ecosystem of industry partners. These partners include global systems integrators like Accenture and Tech Mahindra and software companies like GoTo and Hippocratic AI, each of which is working alongside IOH to boost the telco’s sovereign AI initiatives.
Developing Industry-Specific Applications With Accenture
Partnering with leading professional services company Accenture, IOH is developing applications for industry-specific use cases based on its new AI cloud, Sahabat-AI and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
NVIDIA CEO Huang joined Accenture CEO Julie Sweet in a fireside chat during Indonesia AI Day to discuss how the companies are supporting enterprise and industrial AI in Indonesia.
The collaboration taps into the Accenture AI Refinery platform to help Indonesian enterprises build AI solutions tailored for financial services, energy and other industries, while delivering sovereign data governance.
Initially focused on financial services, IOH’s work with Accenture and NVIDIA technologies is delivering pre-built enterprise solutions that can help Indonesian banks more quickly harness AI.
With a modular architecture, these solutions can meet clients’ needs wherever they are in their AI journeys, helping increase profitability, operational efficiency and sustainable growth.
Building the Indonesian LLM and Chatbot Services With Tech Mahindra
Built with India-based global systems integrator Tech Mahindra, the Sahabat-AI LLMs power various AI services in Indonesia.
For example, Sahabat-AI enables IOH’s AI chatbot to answer queries in the Indonesian language for various citizen and resident services. A person could ask about processes for updating their national identification card, as well as about tax rates, payment procedures, deductions and more.
The chatbot integrates with a broader citizen services platform Tech Mahindra and IOH are developing as part of the Indonesian government’s sovereign AI initiative.
Indosat developed Sahabat-AI using the NVIDIA NeMo platform for developing customized LLMs. The team fine-tuned a version of the Llama 3 8B model, customizing it for Bahasa Indonesian using a diverse dataset tailored for effective communication with users.
To further optimize performance, Sahabat-AI uses NVIDIA NIM microservices, which have demonstrated up to 2.5x greater throughput compared with standard implementations. This improvement in processing efficiency allows for faster responses and more satisfying user experiences.
In addition, NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails open-source software orchestrates dialog management and helps ensure accuracy, appropriateness and security of the LLM-based chatbot.
Many other service capabilities tapping Sahabat-AI are also planned for development, including AI-powered healthcare services and other local applications.
Improving Indonesian Healthcare With Hippocratic AI
Among the first to tap into Sahabat-AI is healthcare AI company Hippocratic AI, which is using the models, the NVIDIA AI platform and IOH’s sovereign AI cloud to develop digital agents that can have humanlike conversations, exhibit empathic qualities, and build rapport and trust with patients across Indonesia.
Hippocratic AI empowers a novel trillion-parameter constellation architecture that brings together specialized healthcare LLM agents to deliver safe, accurate digital agent implementation.
Digital AI agents can significantly increase staff productivity by offloading time-consuming tasks, allowing human nurses and medical professionals to focus on critical duties to increase healthcare accessibility and quality of service.
IOH’s sovereign AI cloud lets Hippocratic AI keep patient data local and secure, and enables extremely low-latency AI inference for its LLMs.
Enhancing Simplicity, Accessibility for On-Demand and Financial Services With GoTo
GoTo offers technology infrastructure and solutions that help users thrive in the digital economy, including through applications spanning on-demand services for transport, food, grocery and logistics delivery, financial services and e-commerce.
The company — which operates one of Indonesia’s leading on-demand transport services, as well as a leading payment application in the country — is adopting and enhancing the new Sahabat-AI models to integrate with its AI voice assistant, called Dira.
Dira is a speech and generative AI-powered digital assistant that helps customers book rides, order food deliveries, transfer money, pay bills and more.
Tapping into Sahabat-AI, Dira is poised to deliver more localized and culturally relevant interactions with application users.
Advancing Sustainability Within Lintasarta as IOH’s AI Factory
Fundamentally, Lintasarta’s AI cloud is an AI factory — a next-generation data center that hosts advanced, full-stack accelerated computing platforms for the most computationally intensive tasks. It’ll enable regional governments, businesses and startups to build, customize and deploy generative AI applications aligned with local language and customs.
Looking forward, Lintasarta plans to expand its AI factory with the most advanced NVIDIA technologies. The infrastructure already boasts a “green” design, powered by renewable energy and sustainable technologies. Lintasarta is committed to adding value to Indonesia’s digital ecosystem with integrated, secure and sustainable technology, in line with the Golden Indonesia 2045 vision.
Beyond Indonesia, NVIDIA NIM microservices are bolstering sovereign AI models that support local languages in India, Japan, Taiwan and many other countries and regions.
NVIDIA NIM microservices, NeMo and NeMo Guardrails are available as part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
Learn more about NVIDIA-powered sovereign AI factories for telecommunications.
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