Zetrix AI Bhd plans to unveil its “NurAI” chatbot for Malaysian users tomorrow, offering guidance in Malay, Indonesian, Arabic and English on a plethora of matters from dining to legal advice based on Sharia or Islamic values.
In the coming months, it will feature AI avatars of Islamic scholars offering advice on lifestyle, health and financial services matters.
Its answers draw on Sharia, the comprehensive system of Islamic laws that governs everything from meal preparation to banking.
To build the model, Zetrix relied on approaches first popularised by DeepSeek’s V3 model.
The Hangzhou-based company worked with the Malaysian team to build its own mixture of experts architecture – a system by which queries are split between a network of so-called experts within the model.
It generates faster results while reducing computational cost.
A team of about 10 DeepSeek researchers also helped Zetrix reduce memory usage, said Fadzli Shah, head of AI development at Zetrix AI.
“It’s an affirmation that innovative AI can blossom outside the tech hotspots of US and China,” said Shah.
“The breadth of technology advances were available to use through DeepSeek because the start-up innovated and bettered western AI models.”
DeepSeek is one of a surge of Chinese developers offering low-cost models to speed AI adoption worldwide – competing directly with models from US start-ups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
That wave of Chinese expansion is helping propel Beijing’s tech diplomacy efforts beyond its borders.
The NurAI model was built under the initiative of the Asean-China AI Lab, a government collaboration.
DeepSeek’s approach helped scale NurAI while staying fast and resource-efficient, Shah said.
“We learned a lot,” he said.
Zetrix’s model is an effort to give Muslim-majority nations and communities an alternative to western and Chinese AI models, Shah said.
It will start with a free but limited version, as well as more comprehensive offerings at monthly subscription tiers of US$5 to US$50.
Eventually, Zetrix hopes to take NurAI to other Muslim-dominated countries in the Middle East or Africa, with each country and every market training it with their own data.
Zetrix is currently working on deploying the model within Malaysia’s Sharia-based courts system to automate administration functions, and is gathering training data, including from scans of ancient manuscripts.
Faith-based AI systems aren’t new and others such as Ask AiDeen and Anakin cater to the Muslim population – hundreds of millions of people around the world.
But Zetrix touts NurAI as a comprehensive large language model based on Islamic values, shaped by a supervisory board of Islamic scholars and clerics in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and elsewhere.