YTL launches AI coding push

KUALA LUMPUR: YTL AI Labs has launched ILMUcode, a frontier AI coding platform designed to give Malaysian developers, students and aspiring software builders access to advanced coding capabilities through sovereign AI infrastructure.

Launched at Universiti Malaya (UM), ILMUcode combines an agentic AI coding assistant with ILMU-GLM-5.3, the latest addition to YTL AI Labs' ILMU family of models, developed in partnership with Z.ai.

The platform is designed to support the software development process, from understanding complex codebases and writing or modifying code to troubleshooting problems and turning ideas into working software.

The launch was officiated by Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abd Kadir.

UM will be the first university in Malaysia to introduce ILMUcode to its students, with 800 first-year students from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology receiving RM100 in monthly credits for three months.

This gives each student up to RM300 in credits to explore, develop and build with the platform as the new academic semester begins.

UM vice-chancellor Datuk Seri Dr Noor Azuan Abu Osman said the initiative would give computer science students access to frontier AI coding capabilities while strengthening Malaysia's technology talent pipeline.

"We are proud that Universiti Malaya is the first university in Malaysia to give our computer science students access to the next generation of frontier AI coding via ILMUcode.

"Through ILMUcode, we are equipping Malaysia's next generation of technology builders and strengthening our Malaysian AI talent pipeline," he said in a statement.

YTL AI Labs chief executive officer Foong Chee Mun said ILMUcode brings together Malaysia's AI capabilities with technologies developed by leading global AI companies while retaining sovereign infrastructure.

"ILMU brings together Malaysia's own AI capabilities with the best technologies from around the world. We are building our own flagship models and partnering with the world's leading AI companies from Nvidia to Z.ai to bring their capabilities into the ILMU family, while remaining sovereign," he said.

"With the launch of ILMUcode, we are equipping Malaysians with frontier AI not just to use it, but to build with AI and contribute to Malaysia's ambition to become an AI nation," said Foong said.

At the centre of the ILMU family is YTL AI Labs' flagship multimodal model, which the company said tops the MalayMMLU benchmark for Bahasa Melayu. The portfolio also includes speech recognition, text-to-speech and embedding models.

Through its partnership with Nvidia, YTL AI Labs has also developed the agentic ILMU-Nemo models based on Nvidia Nemotron open models, which power ILMUclaw.

ILMUcode expands the ILMU portfolio into AI-assisted software development through its partnership with Z.ai, bringing the capabilities of its GLM-5.3 coding model to Malaysian developers through sovereign AI infrastructure.

ILMUcode joins YTL AI Labs' growing portfolio of AI products, including ILMUclaw, which enables users to build autonomous AI agents, and ILMUchat, its conversational AI platform available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.