UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy on Digital and Emerging Technologies, Mr. Amandeep Singh Gill, visited Nazarbayev University.
Mr. Amandeep Singh Gill met with Kazakhstan’s Minister of Science and Higher Education, Sayasat Nurbek, and the NU leadership, including Vice President Darkhan Bilyalov. During the meeting, the parties discussed opportunities for cooperation in digitalization, artificial intelligence, research, and human capital development. Special attention was given to the integration of advanced digital technologies into higher education, support for young researchers, and the creation of an inclusive digital ecosystem.
Mr. Gill also learned about key projects at the NU Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (NU ISSAI). Professor Atakan Varol, the institute’s director general, presented several developments, including the large language model KazLLM, the speech model SoyleApp2, the language-audio-vision platform Oylan2, and Beynele — a multilingual model capable of generating high-quality images from text. The UN envoy praised the institute’s achievements and expressed interest in further collaboration.
The visit concluded with a lecture for students, during which Mr. Gill discussed UN initiatives in artificial intelligence and the importance of open-source technologies.
“At the UN, we are broadly looking at technology to accelerate progress on the sustainable networks,” he noted. “In India, for example, hundreds of millions of people were not in the financial system. However, by utilizing digital public infrastructure, a layer of digital ID, a payments layer, and a data exchange layer, the process was accelerated and completed in six to seven years rather than the estimated four decades. It opened tremendous opportunities for small businesses, women entrepreneurs, and street vendors alike,” noted the UN Envoy on Technology.
