YTL AI Labs and NVIDIA release 1.35 million synthetic Malaysian personas for AI

YTL AI Labs, the AI arm of YTL Power International, announced an open dataset on 23 September 2026 that is meant to help AI systems understand Malaysians. Called Nemotron-Personas-Malaysia, it holds 1.35 million synthetic personas, each a made-up but statistically realistic profile of someone living in the country.[1][4]

The dataset was built with NVIDIA and joins its Nemotron-Personas series. YTL says it is free for commercial use and is the first in the series to lead with Bahasa Melayu.[1]

YTL says each persona is generated from probability tables built on published data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia, OpenDOSM, MyCensus, eStatistik and national labour-force publications. It starts with 150,000 base records and expands them into 1.35 million personas, each described across 39 fields.[1]

Those fields cover age, gender, occupation and region, plus personality traits based on the five-factor OCEAN model used in psychology. YTL says no personal data is included and no individual can be identified. The records describe people who could exist, not people who do.[1]

YTL says the method works down to district level. Besides the Malay, Chinese and Indian populations, it keeps the Kadazan-Dusun, Bajau, Murut, Iban, Bidayuh and Melanau communities, with separate Bumiputera categories for Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia rather than one merged group.[1]

The release illustrates the output with Yunus, a synthetic 39-year-old carpenter in Melaka who earns RM1,873 a month, observes daily prayers and hopes to open a woodcarving workshop. YTL is clear that no real person sits behind him. Every detail comes from published population distributions.[1]

YTL suggests uses across the development cycle, from generating training data and fine-tuning to alignment, red-teaming and testing. A customer service bot could be tried against synthetic customers of different ages, states and languages. A bank could check whether its AI understands how Malaysians describe financial needs.[1]

Agencies could test whether digital services work equally well across income and demographic groups, and researchers could look for groups a model serves badly. These are the uses the company describes. No Malaysian results from them have been published yet.[1]

The dataset uses NVIDIA's NeMo Data Designer library and Nemotron-Personas framework, and follows versions for the United States, Japan, India, Singapore, Brazil, France, Korea, El Salvador, Vietnam and Belgium. On the same day, NVIDIA's AI Day Singapore post said YTL AI Labs is fine-tuning Nemotron models for enterprise and citizen services.[1][2]

For YTL, the personas are one layer of a sovereign AI stack that also includes YTL AI Cloud, its ILMU models and the ILMUchat assistant. Chief executive Foong Chee Mun said the next generation of AI will be defined by "how well intelligence understands the people it serves".[1]