Welcome to Tech in Asia’s Sunday newsletter, your weekend brief on the biggest moves in Asia’s tech and startup world. Not on the mailing list? Register here. Got a story tip? Send it to editors@techinasia.com.
In focus
- Peter Cowan on why the personal touch in AI matters
- AI teachers, coming soon?
- Game over on Grab and Lazada
Hello reader,
Of the many excellent points raised in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she posits that the future of the AI industry could (and perhaps should) be task-specific large language models (LLMs), rather than the resource-hungry general models like ChatGPT and Grok.
Aside from the ethical points in favor of this approach that Hao makes, focusing on localization and personalization could be a differentiator for companies in the AI space. After all, how are firms with just a few million dollars in funding supposed to compete with goliaths like OpenAI?
Image credit: Timmy Loen
US-based Datasaur is betting that the answer lies in building private LLMs for its clients. As my colleague Glenn Kaonang reports, these private models now make up half of its annualized revenue.
The firm’s clients typically can’t afford OpenAI’s costs for customized services, so it may just have found a niche that works.
Similarly, Indian edtech startup Arivihan offers an AI-powered personal tutoring platform. Its advantage, for now, is its focus on Indian students, fine-tuning its system to local languages, exam patterns, and cultural context in ways that global players like Google’s Gemini can’t easily replicate.
Arivihan has a bold goal of completely replacing human teachers on its platform with AI avatars within three to five years. Samreen Ahmad’s story explores just how feasible, ethical, and desirable that is. Like any good article, it gave me some answers and left me pondering plenty of hard questions.
We finish with a look at who’s who in Southeast Asia’s generative AI space. Time will tell, but my hunch is that those building the most niche, local, and deeply personal solutions will be the ones that endure.
In the end, does relevance beat scale? You decide.
Peter Cowan, engagement editor
Editor’s picks
1️⃣ Why Datasaur is chasing private AI over scraps in data labeling
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