Latest news and updates from DSML Kazakhstan community
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KazLLM, developed by Kazakhstan's ISSAI institute at Nazarbayev University, received recognition from a highly respected figure: “At the AI Action Summit in Paris, I met a delegation from Kazakhstan that showed me KazLLM—a version of Llama adapted for Kazakh and other languages spoken in the region. Excellent results in Kazakh.”
Sincere congratulations from the DSML KZ community to everyone involved!
We are happy to share that the first model-comparison results are now available!
Next steps:
More details:
The team welcomes feedback and invites everyone interested to collaborate!
Community members Sanzhar Murzakhmetov @stringersolo, Beksultan Sagyndyk @bsagyndyk, and Kirill Yakunin @JenarosHat released a series of benchmarks for language understanding, reasoning, and other features of Kazakh.
1) The team translated several popular datasets into Kazakh:
2) They created custom Kazakhstan-focused multiple-choice benchmarks:
The team is building an open leaderboard for these benchmarks and a platform for testing and comparing models developed for Kazakh.
Read more in the team's LinkedIn post.
Zangir studied how neural networks and reinforcement learning can accelerate solutions to combinatorial problems such as routing, resource allocation, and planning. He presented the following projects:
This work was published at IJCAI23, ACML23, IEEE Access, and NeurIPS24.
MBZUAI is the world's first university dedicated to artificial intelligence. It opened in Abu Dhabi in 2019 and ranks among the top 20 in AI/ML. Zangir became the third PhD candidate in MBZUAI's history to successfully defend his dissertation!
Applications recently opened for MBZUAI Master's and PhD programs starting in fall 2025. The university offers five areas: ML, CV, NLP, CS, and Robotics. The first application-round deadline is January 15, 2025.
Kolesa Group conducted its third study of Kazakhstan's data-profession market.
The profession has matured since 2021. Compared with the previous study, the share of specialists aged 26–30 increased by 15%, while the share based in Almaty and Astana rose by 6%. Overall experience also increased over three years: specialists with three to five years of experience grew from 38% to 49%.
Salaries:
Over the past three years, the average salary increased by about 40%. The number of analysts working in fintech companies grew by 17%. Respondents value remote work (42%) more than company culture (35%).
As before, raw data was made available to our community.
