Launched at Bali Tech Week 2026, the open-source model is freely available for start-ups, businesses, universities, researchers and public institutions to use, study and adapt, allowing them to build locally relevant AI without starting from scratch. Alongside Indonesian, the model recognizes Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese and Bataknese.

The initiative aligns with the Communications and Digital Ministry’s road map to Indonesia Digital Vision 2045, which aims to build an inclusive and collaborative digital ecosystem driven by innovation to support a sovereign, advanced and sustainable Indonesia by shifting the country from a consumer to a creator of AI technology.

Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid said the government's grand vision required absolute synergy across the industry.

“As an enabler, orchestrator and accelerator, the ministry cannot function effectively or achieve the President's Asta Cita targets without the support of operators building networks, companies developing digital services and the many technology companies involved here. We should give our full encouragement to operators and companies developing digital services," Meutya said on Oct. 19 during the event in Sanur.

“Indonesia makes great use of global AI, but we must also build our own to solve the problems that are unique to us,” GoTo Group CEO Hans Patuwo told a panel discussion at Bali Tech Week.

“AI created for global use may not be fully optimized for our localized data or the regional languages so many Indonesians grow up [speaking] at home. Opening this technology to everyone is our way of giving back to the country, providing anyone building AI in Indonesia with a starting point rooted in the local context,” he explained.

Created by the company’s extensive team of AI engineers, the midsize 27-billion-parameter model builds upon open-model work initiated by GoTo in 2024.

The company stated the model was capable enough for demanding language tasks yet compact enough for a university, start-up or public institution to run on their own servers rather than via a data center.

The model was trained on Indonesian text from media partners and public websites as well as regional language data. For Batak, GoTo collaborated with the University of North Sumatra (USU) to collect data that reflect how the language is used today.

The project also highlights a broader effort to cultivate domestic tech talent, as it involved interns from seven universities from Sumatra to Sulawesi, including Bali’s Udayana University, working alongside GoTo’s AI teams on real-world projects.

The students participated in preparing data as well as training and testing models. They also lent their voices to train the company's Indonesian speech technology and helped gather Batak language data.

GoTo said these efforts reflected a broader approach to strengthening Indonesia’s AI capabilities by empowering local talent to develop the skills necessary to build artificial intelligence.

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