News

Great news for everyone interested in adapting LLMs to the Kazakh language!

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:

• MMLU in Kazakh: Evaluates multitask language understanding
• GSM8K in Kazakh: Tests mathematical reasoning

2) They created custom Kazakhstan-focused multiple-choice benchmarks:

• Kazakh Constitution MC: Tests legal and civic knowledge
• Kazakh Dastur MC: Evaluates understanding of cultural heritage and customs
• Unified National Test MC: Covers history, literature, biology, and other subjects

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.

Congratulations to our DSML KZ colleague @zangir_iklassov on successfully defending his PhD dissertation! 🎉 🎉

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:

• A new training approach for production planning in which problem complexity increases dynamically, improving model training
• An RL framework for routing problems with stochastic travel times on a graph
• A new self-directed search strategy that uses large language models to solve combinatorial problems efficiently

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 Study 3.0

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:

• Data Science — 825,000 tenge; median — 1,099,576 tenge
• Data Analysis — 650,000 tenge; median — 857,485 tenge
• BI — 650,000 tenge; median — 726,639 tenge
• DWH — 824,000 tenge; median — 1,081,145 tenge
• ML — 1,350,000 tenge; median — 1,600,769 tenge
• Other — 925,000 tenge; median — 929,180 tenge

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.

NLP meetup by Beeline Kazakhstan and QazCode | October 24, 2024, 17:00 | Almaty

On October 24 at DAR U, we will discuss language models. QazCode (Beeline) Data Scientist Beksultan Sagyndyk will share recent NLP trends and explain how the Kazakh language is being integrated into the LLM era. Beksultan is one of the specialists developing Kazakh-language AI at Beeline Kazakhstan and QazCode.

Afterward, experts from QazCode, Big Data Team, and Conformal Group will join an informal discussion about NLP in business and how to apply LLMs in real-world cases.

Date: October 24, 17:00. Venue: DAR U, Koktem-2, 22, 4th floor.

The event is free, but places are limited. Register here.