Malaysia

Ryt Bank, Malaysia’s first AI-powered bank, backed by YTL Group and Sea Limited, aims to revolutionize banking with its AI-driven platform, prioritizing linguistic inclusivity by supporting Bahasa Malaysia and English. Its digital assistant, Ryt AI, powered by the local ILMU language model, handles financial tasks and offers personalized insights. The all-in-one app provides services for saving, spending, borrowing, and bill payments. Operating under Bank Negara Malaysia’s regulations, Ryt Bank employs multi-layered security measures. The launch highlights AI’s potential to reshape Malaysia’s financial sector by focusing on accessibility and cultural understanding.

Malaysia is implementing a licensing regime for U.S.-made high-performance AI chip exports and transshipments to prevent diversion, especially to China. Effective immediately, entities suspecting misuse must notify authorities 30 days prior to export and obtain permits. This addresses regulatory loopholes, with plans to add AI chips to the Strategic Items List. This follows U.S. efforts to tighten export controls on advanced NVIDIA GPUs to Malaysia and Thailand, requiring licenses to prevent re-export to China.

An AI company is bypassing export controls by physically transporting data to Malaysia for AI model training. Four employees are hand-carrying 4.8 petabytes of data on hard drives via air freight to avoid online data transfer restrictions. This method, previously employed for training, allows access to advanced computing resources and is a complex workaround driven by increasing difficulties in acquiring AI chips and stricter export controls.