Pakistan has officially launched its first homegrown Urdu language AI model, named Qalb. Developed by Taimoor Hassan, a Pakistani student studying in the United States, Qalb is being recognized as the world’s largest Large Language Model designed exclusively for the Urdu language. The model was trained on 1.97 billion tokens and evaluated across more than seven international benchmarking frameworks, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing Urdu-focused AI systems on key real-world metrics.
Taimoor Hassan is a young entrepreneur with a history of launching and exiting 13 startups. He is a former Microsoft Cup winner and has represented Pakistan on several international platforms. After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from FAST University, Hassan is now pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University, where he continues to work on cutting-edge AI and technology projects.
With over 230 million Urdu speakers worldwide, Qalb is designed to bridge a long-standing technology gap by enabling advanced AI capabilities in the national language. The model aims to support local businesses, startups, educational platforms, digital services, and voice-based AI applications. Hassan emphasized that the project is part of a broader mission to advance Pakistan’s technological future and credited his undergraduate teammates, Jawad Ahmed and Muhammad Awais, for their contributions.
The development team highlighted that innovation is no longer restricted to large corporations. Modern technology allows small, agile teams to create tools that educate, automate, and serve millions of users without requiring massive budgets. The Qalb project reflects this trend by providing a scalable, localized AI solution for the Urdu-speaking community and specialized industry applications.
