Cantonese AI startup Votee challenges English-Mandarin dominance

Votee AI's approach highlights a gap in the AI boom: while English and Mandarin dominate, hundreds of languages are underserved. The company's strategy is to take existing open-weight models and retrain them on Cantonese data, a process that costs roughly $250,000 per model, using between 500 million and 1 billion tokens. This is minuscule compared to the trillions of tokens used for English models, making it feasible for a startup.

The push for 'sovereign AI' is a broader trend, with Indonesia's Indosat building Sahabat AI for Bahasa, Singapore's AI Singapore running SEA-LION for 11 Southeast Asian languages, and South Korea staging an 'AI Squid Game' competition with a $6.8 billion budget. Votee's CEO argues that governments need to own their foundation models to avoid being 'tethered' to overseas providers, though he admits a full sovereign AI stack is 'very difficult.'

Votee's for-profit model relies on client contracts, and it has Allan Zeman, a Hong Kong tycoon, as an advisor. The company's next step is expanding into Southeast Asia, and it is in discussions with AI Singapore. The long-term vision includes protecting endangered languages, but whether a 70-billion-parameter model can make a difference remains to be seen.