Who pays for AI in your language?

Welcome to The Prompt, your guide to the biggest issues and developments shaping AI, with Asia front and center. Want full access to all our AI reporting? Subscribe here.

---

Hello reader,

At the Sahabat-AI launch I attended in November 2024, GoTo demonstrated something I could see myself using: a voice assistant that could understand a request like, “Order the same meal I had yesterday,” spoken in informal Indonesian.

Called Dira, the assistant had already been introduced to some GoPay users using Google’s AI model. Sahabat-AI was supposed to enhance Dira’s fluency in the local language during interactions, and GoTo said it would expand access to the assistant in phases.

It’s been almost two years, but I still can’t find Dira on either Gojek or GoPay.

So when GoTo released another Indonesian-language model this week – dropping the Sahabat (meaning “friend”) moniker and calling it GoTo AI – this question came to mind: What will people actually use it for?

The new model is freely available for developers to use and adapt. GoTo says it’s building “locally relevant AI” for its own customers, too. But releasing a model and turning it into a useful everyday service – and actually making it available to the masses – are different milestones.

That gap is at the heart of our top AI read this week, in which my colleague Pranav takes a closer look at the reality behind AI language models.

For languages where that commercial case remains weak, government funding and philanthropy may have to foot a huge portion of the bill. Even when the demand exists, serving millions of people in their own languages can still be a difficult business.

Meanwhile, our second story dives into what allows the physical AI sector to thrive in

South Korea. Once again, government support matters, even for a country whose industrial robot adoption already tops everyone else.

Glenn Kaonang, journalist

---

TOP AI READS FROM OUR DESK

1️⃣ The truth about AI language models: No one wants to pay for them

---

WHAT ELSE WE’RE THINKING

---

FOUNDER FOCUS

---