Satbayev University and RK MSHE have opened new horizons for the country's higher education

Introducing the digital tools is an important strategic task for Kazakhstan, but it is equally important to train the people who will use them. To solve this ambitious task, Satbayev University hosted a workshop of Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan dedicated to the introduction of artificial intelligence into the country's education system.

The event brought together Vice-rectors for digitalization of leading universities, experts in the field of AI and representatives of government agencies. Moderator of the event, director of  Digitalization Department at MSHE Nursultan Makhatov, stressed the importance of introducing the digital tools such as large language models to ensure the digital sovereignty of the country:

"Today we have gathered all Vice-rectors for digitalization here to transform their minds," he said. - We want to bring them to an understanding of how artificial intelligence can transform the university's activities from the academic to the managerial part. This will help us ensure the sovereignty of our country in the future.

In addition to explanations about the principles of artificial intelligence and interaction between students and teachers in the new reality, Kazakh developments were presented at the master class, such as the large KazLLM language model in Kazakh and the state national platform of state intelligence, on the basis of which chatbots for the e-government portal are currently being elaborated.

The presentation of Director General of Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI), Hussein Atakan Varol, who presented the large KazLLM language model designed for text processing, analysis and generation, received great attention from the workshop participants. The model is based on 150 billion tokens in Kazakh, Russian, English and Turkish and is available online at https://oylan.nu.edu.kz/

The workshop ended with a foresight session led by Oleg Metsik, Director of SIMKON, aimed at developing the strategies for integrating AI into educational processes. The participants built practical plans for the introduction of artificial intelligence in their universities and discussed the prospects for using the digital tools to improve education quality and management efficiency at universities in Kazakhstan.