ILMU (ILMUchat)

What we found

ILMU — short for Intelek Luhur Malaysia Untukmu — was launched by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on 12 August 2025 at the ASEAN AI Malaysia Summit, with the ILMUchat assistant opening to early access on 16 September. YTL AI Labs built it with Universiti Malaya to handle Malaysian code-switching: Bahasa Melayu, English, Chinese, dialects and Manglish blended in one sentence, which is how much everyday Malaysian conversation works. YTL calls it the country's first homegrown multimodal LLM; that is its own claim.

The best-known hands-on write-up, a January 2026 Medium post by Peter Ho that YTL later republished, had it give a neutral, sourced account of the 1MDB scandal, citing the USD 4.5 billion figure and 33 sources, and summed it up as understanding "the Rojak" but speaking "like a Professor". The author says he ran the tests through a Claude browser extension and co-wrote the piece with an LLM, so read it as a guided demo rather than an independent review. The formality complaint has since been addressed: a June 2026 update lets users draft in tones from formal to casual Manglish.

On benchmarks, YTL reports ILMU scoring 87.2 on MalayMMLU against GPT-4o's 85.0 — a benchmark built by YTL's own partnership with Universiti Malaya — and the often-quoted A grades in the PT3 and SPM Malay exams belonged to an earlier 2024 version. Treat both as vendor claims.

Deployment is real. ILMU powers Ryt Bank, Yes subscribers get ILMUchat Pro through single sign-on, and ILMU Claw, an agent platform launched in April 2026, runs on ILMU-Nemo-Nano, developed with NVIDIA, on YTL's own cloud.

Pricing is now public: ILMUchat is free, with Pro at RM50 a month; the API costs RM4 per million input tokens and RM16 per million output on the flagship model, far less on the mini model, and Claw plans start at RM25 a seat. YTL says prompts are not used for training.

Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.