Tempo Joins Forces with Multiple Media to Bolster Sahabat-AI

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Four Indonesian media outlets, Tempo, Kompas, Republika, and HukumOnline, have officially joined forces in a strategic initiative to strengthen Sahabat-AI, a domestically created large language model (LLM). This collaboration aims to improve Sahabat-AI's language and local context capabilities by providing news materials as training data.

It should be noted that a large language model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained with extensive text data to understand, produce, and interact in human language. This enables Sahabat-AI, for example, to process your questions and provide relevant answers even in regional languages.

The top executives of these four media outlets expressed optimism about this collaboration. They believe that quality journalism, which has gone through layers of verification and confirmation, will result in clearer and more accurate AI.

Wahyu Dhyatmika, CEO of Tempo Digital, highlighted the importance of quality journalism. "We believe that quality journalism will contribute to the clarity of the results of artificial intelligence in Sahabat-AI because the news we produce has gone through layers of verification and confirmation," he said in a written statement on Friday, June 20, 2025. Wahyu added that Tempo's distinctive news writing style can enrich Sahabat-AI's language capabilities. This collaboration sets a new standard for how journalism adapts in the AI era.

Echoing Wahyu's sentiment, CEO of KG Media (parent company of Kompas), Andy Budiman, emphasized the ethical aspects of AI development. He viewed the collaboration between KG Media and GoTo in Sahabat-AI as a real example of how technology companies can act responsibly and ethically while respecting copyright and information credibility. "Amid the rampant practices of AI development that overlook ethics, such as taking media content without permission, this collaboration shows a different direction," Andy asserted.

Meanwhile, the Editor-in-Chief of Republika, Andi Muhyiddin, sees Sahabat-AI as an important part of journalism's transformation in the AI era. According to him, AI must be strategically utilized to strengthen reporting quality, accelerate information distribution, and remain in favor of the public interest. "This adaptation is not only about technology, but also about maintaining the relevancy, accuracy, and integrity of the media in conveying the public's voice," he explained.

From a legal perspective, Arkka Dhiratara, CEO of HukumOnline, emphasized the urgency of developing an LLM that understands Indonesia's context and complexity. He expressed his pride in becoming a media partner of Sahabat-AI and fully supporting an inclusive, relevant, and sovereign local AI ecosystem.

Sahabat-AI itself was developed by GoTo and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH). This is a breakthrough in Indonesian AI technology with the capability of multilingual chat, including regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Batak.

This technology was first introduced at the Indosat Indonesia AI Day forum in November 2024. This initiative is expected to bolster Indonesia's digital sovereignty by ensuring its ability to independently manage artificial intelligence technology.

Currently, Sahabat-AI's capacity has been significantly increased to 70 billion parameters, reflecting its increased complexity and capabilities. This enhancement has resulted in higher accuracy in the generated responses. Users can access the latest chat services of Sahabat-AI via the website sahabat-ai.com or the GoPay application in the "Citizens' Favorite Services" menu. This service has advanced reasoning capabilities that allow users to ask questions and receive informative answers in natural language.

The development of Sahabat-AI is carried out with a spirit of cooperation, involving collaboration between various parties, including research institutions, media organizations, government agencies, and educational partners. In addition to partnering with mainstream media, collaboration continues with leading universities such as the University of Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University, Bandung Institute of Technology, IPB University, Udayana University, and North Sumatra University. The collaboration aims to optimize Sahabat-AI according to the local context and Indonesian culture.

Since the model launch with capacities of 8 and 9 billion parameters, with over 35,000 downloads, Sahabat-AI is one of the most popular projects on Hugging Face, an online platform that provides various tools and resources for AI model development. This open access is designed to empower the Indonesian AI ecosystem by encouraging the development and experimentation of several AI applications that meet domestic needs.

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