Indonesia’s tech unicorn GoTo Group and telecommunications firm Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison have launched the latest version of Sahabat-AI, a locally developed open-source large language model (LLM), top executives announced during a media event in Jakarta on Monday.
Initially released in November 2024 with 8-9 billion parameters, Sahabat-AI is now equipped with 70 billion parameters and multilingual chat capabilities, including significantly enhanced accuracy and reasoning ability, enabling contextual and voice-based natural language interactions through a publicly accessible chatbot available via the GoPay app and sahabat-ai.com. The model has already recorded over 35,000 downloads on Hugging Face.
“The new multilingual model allows us to serve people better, from search on GoFood to customer support, by understanding queries in context,” GoTo Group CEO Patrick Walujo said during a panel discussion.
Within GoTo’s ecosystem, Sahabat-AI is used in various contexts, including GoFood’s search engine, where GoTo leverages it to interpret highly variable Indonesian search queries more effectively than traditional keyword-based search. This has helped improve conversion from searches to completed orders.
The model supports five local languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Bataknese. Unlike many large LLMs requiring 16 or more GPUs, Sahabat-AI’s efficiency allows it to run on just two H100 GPUs, making it more accessible and cost-effective for other open-source models.
Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), which provides the GPU infrastructure via its sovereign AI cloud GPU Merdeka, views the project as part of its broader mission to “empower every Indonesian.” According to IOH’s Director Muhammad Buldansyah, the partnership allows not just GoTo but also startups, universities, and public institutions to tap into locally-hosted AI resources.
The model is the product of extensive national collaboration involving leading universities such as Universitas Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University, and ITB, as well as local media partners. GoTo and Indosat have also invested in local talent, training over 500 Indonesian engineers and launching internship programmes that allow students to work directly on model development.
As GoTo looks ahead, Walujo said Sahabat-AI will expand into multimodal AI, extending to graphics and video. “We hope this ecosystem becomes a foundation for innovation across Indonesia’s AI community,” he added.
