LAHORE: Pakistan has taken an important step in its digital evolution with the official launch of “Qalb,” the country’s first large-scale artificial intelligence model developed exclusively for the Urdu language. The announcement itself has drawn widespread attention, technology experts suggest that this milestone may represent only the beginning of a much larger transformation.
In this regard, Qalb, described as Pakistan’s own Urdu ChatGPT, has been developed under the leadership of Taimoor Hassan, a Pakistani technologist currently studying in the United States. The model is the world’s largest Large Language Model (LLM) created solely for Urdu, trained on an unprecedented dataset of nearly two billion tokens.
In this sense, Urdu is spoken by more than 230 million people globally, yet digital tools capable of understanding and generating the language at scale have remained limited.
Furthermore, behind the project is a relatively small team led by Hassan, a young serial entrepreneur with a history of launching technology ventures. However, those close to the project emphasize that Qalb is not the result of institutional backing or large corporate investment.
Instead, the initiative indicates a growing trend where compact, highly skilled teams are building globally competitive technologies. The developers believe Qalb could support a wide range of applications, including education platforms, local startups, digital customer services, and voice-based AI systems tailored for Urdu-speaking users.
Hassan described the project as a contribution toward a broader national objective, mentioning collaboration with his teammates Jawad Ahmed and Muhammad Awais. He stressed that localized artificial intelligence models could play a critical role in Pakistan’s future digital economy.
