KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 23): YTL AI Labs Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of YTL Power International Bhd (KL:YTLPOWR), announced the creation of a dataset of 1.35 million synthetic personas that will help in the development of artificial intelligence models that suit Malaysia's diversity.   

The dataset, called Nemotron-Personas-Malaysia, was developed in collaboration with tech giant NVIDIA.

Its 1.35 million synthetic personas were generated from 150,000 base records from Malaysian demographic statistics published by the Department of Statistics Malaysia, OpenDOSM, MyCensus, eStatistik and national labour-force publications. 

No personal data that can be linked to any individual were used.

Each persona is essentially a hypothetical person generated by probability tables based on the demographic statistics. 

The collection of freely accessible structured data allows developers, researchers and enterprises to train AI models that reflect Malaysia’s diverse languages, cultures, regional differences and working lives.

"A customer service agent, for example, could be tested against synthetic customers of different ages, states, occupations and languages. A bank could evaluate whether its AI understands the different ways Malaysians express financial needs, while government agencies could test whether digital services work effectively across different socioeconomic and demographic groups. Researchers can also identify where models systematically underperform for particular populations,"  YTL AI Labs said in statement. 

Nematron-Personas-Malaysia is the latest in NVIDIA’s growing Nemotron-Personas collection, which include datasets from the US, Japan, India, Singapore, Brazil, France, Korea, El Salvador, Vietnam and Belgium.

This will be the first dataset in the collection to have Bahasa Melayu.

"Together, these capabilities expand what it means to build sovereign AI in Malaysia. Sovereign AI is not only about having the computing infrastructure to run AI and Malaysian models to power it, but also the data and context needed to shape how AI understands and serves Malaysians," YTL AI Labs chief executive officers Foong Chee Mun said in a statement.

"The goal is to enable Malaysians to build intelligence for themselves, using world-class technology while retaining control over the context and priorities that make it uniquely Malaysian."