Tech

LankaGPT to launch Sri Lanka’s first Sinhala and Tamil AI GPT platform

Published

2 years ago

May 30, 2024

LankaGPT Technologies is preparing to launch Sri Lanka’s first-ever Sinhala and Tamil AI Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) by July 2024.

Named Sigiriya AI, the text-based AI platform is designed to generate human-like responses to prompts in the Sri Lankan Sinhala and Tamil languages.

“The main objective was to create a Sri Lankan-centric AI platform, accessible to Sri Lankans globally. We aim to promote our culture and preserve our Sinhala and Tamil languages, which are declining in usage,” said LankaGPT Technologies Co-Founder and Director Lakshitha Karunaratne.

The AI tool has been developed using a total collection of 10 billion proprietary data sets for the Sinhala and Tamil languages, respectively.

According to Karunaratne, the AI tool is a foundational GPT platform for Sri Lanka, distinct from OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.

Developed in partnership with Caladium Capitals USA, the AI tool is designed to deliver responses with 95 percent accuracy for prompts based on factual and empirical data.

The programmers of the platform are located across Sri Lanka, India, the UK, USA, and Dubai. The primary market aim is to penetrate regions such as the Middle East, Canada, and Australia, which have a significant population of Sri Lankans.

Moreover, LankaGPT is looking forward to providing the tool free of charge to several sectors in the country.

“We recognize the role AI can play in enhancing the economic and social landscape. For this reason, we are deeply committed to providing this tool free of charge to the education, agriculture, and healthcare sectors, with the hope of driving innovation, empowering communities, and fostering sustainable development,” Karunaratne announced.

The subscription price for the platform for local users will be disclosed after the launch of the complete product by the second week of July.

Initially introduced as a text-based platform, the tool will be upgraded to work with voice, image, and audio inputs in the future, Karunaratne said.

Tech

Sri Lanka leads South Asia in AI job growth, ranks second in ChatGPT usage: World Bank

Published

3 months ago

October 27, 2025

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Sri Lanka has emerged as one of South Asia’s most AI-exposed economies, with strong growth in artificial intelligence–related jobs but also mounting risks of job displacement, according to the World Bank’s South Asia Development Update: Jobs, AI, and Trade (October 2025).

The report’s latest chapter, “Artificial Intelligence, Real Impact: Labor Market Implications of AI Adoption in South Asia,” finds that Sri Lanka and Bhutan have the highest AI exposure in the region, reflecting their relatively skilled and educated workforces.

“Within South Asia, exposure varies by country: Nepal has the lowest average exposure, while Bhutan and Sri Lanka exhibit the highest exposure rates, reflecting their relatively more skilled and educated workforces,” the report states.

Tech

BYD breaks record for world’s fastest car

Published

4 months ago

September 26, 2025

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BYD’s Yangwang U9 “Xtreme” supercar recorded a blistering top speed of 496.22km/h (308 miles per hour) at a test track in Germany earlier this month, the Chinese EV maker said.

That’s a record for a production car, handily beating the 490.5 km/h (304.7 mph) set by Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport in 2019 and marking the first time the title of world’s fastest car has been held by an EV.

The Xtreme is a high-performance version of Yangwang U9, BYD’s pothole-jumping hypercar, which costs around $233,000 in China.

BYD said just 30 units of the ultra-fast variant, which features an upgraded powertrain and battery system, will be made.

It means that as well as boasting the world’s cheapest EVs, China is now home to the fastest.

Tech

Sri Lanka launches largest Sinhala LLM with 10 million sentences (SinLlama)

Published

5 months ago

August 30, 2025

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Research students at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa have developed the country’s first large-scale large language model (LLM) that exclusively include Sinhala, a breakthrough in advancing local language computing.

This project was jointly supervised by Dr Surangika Ranathunga (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr Nisansa de Silva (University of Moratuwa) and Dr Rishemjit Kaur (Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India).

The model, named “SinLlama,” was built by continually pre-training Llama-3-8B with nearly 10 million Sinhala sentences. According to the research team, SinLlama is the largest Sinhala LLM to date and has already outperformed Llama-3-8B on Sinhala text classification benchmarks.