(TibetanReview.net, Mar17’26) – China said Mar 16 that it had launched the world’s first Tibetan large language model and its application, DeepZang. Developed by CHOKNOR Information Technology Co., Ltd. Officially unveiled in Lhasa, the company’s chairman has said it will help prevent dissemination of distorted ideologies and values.
“Through this large language model and its application, we also aim to provide an authentic platform for global users seeking to learn about Tibetan culture, history and politics, thereby preventing the dissemination of distorted ideologies and values,” China’s official globaltimes.cn Mar 16 quoted the company’s Chairman Tenzin Norbu as saying.
This model fills the gap in indigenous large language models at both the national and ethnic levels, while also facilitating the innovation and inheritance of Tibetan ethnic culture in the AI era, Tenzin has said.
The report said the World Record Certification Agency (WRCA) had awarded the certification of “the World’s first Tibetan large language model” at DeepZang’s launch event on Mar16.
Tenzin has said this open-source large model platform is China’s first ethnic language AI open platform designed for multilingual and multimodal capabilities. The DeepZang platform is stated to support over 80 languages, including Tibetan, Putonghua, English, Mongolian and Uyghur, enabling an integrated approach to listening, speaking, translating, recognizing and thinking.
The report said the DeepZang model marks a strategic leap for China to take the lead in the AI field for ethnic languages, officially inaugurating the high-quality AI development of Tibetan-language in Tibet Autonomous Region and dawning the era of AI for the Tibetan language.
Tenzin has said the company had built a high-quality parallel corpus of nearly 70 million precise Tibetan-Putonghua language pairs. Additionally, they have completed large-scale speech data collection across the three major Tibetan dialect regions, establishing China’s largest and accurately annotated Tibetan speech database to date.
Tenzin has said the model is currently limited by the scope of its corpus data, and the company will continue to refine and update it based on user feedback. In the future, this large language model is set to extend its capabilities to sectors including education, healthcare and ecology, delivering convenient and efficient services to enterprises and government agencies.
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The use of Tibetan language on an artificial intelligence platform is, however, neither new nor novel. The Monlam Tibetan IT Research Centre of exile Tibetans based in India said at its third annual event on Nov 3 in Dharamshala, India, that its Melong.ai surpassed existing large language models such as Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek in the Tibetan‑language generation and comprehension.
While launching four major digital tools at its 2025 Monlam Manifestation event held at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), the centre said its newly upgraded “Monlam Think”, an updated version of Monlam Melong, was particularly noteworthy for surpassing global AI models in Tibetan language comprehension and analysis.
Melong.ai is also multilingual and multimodal, supporting more than 140 languages and accepting both image and text input.
Monlam Melong is part of Monlam IT team’s pioneering AI work, aimed not just at making Tibetan digitally accessible, but also at preserving the language and the knowledge it carries in a way that reflects Tibetan perspectives and understanding.
Monlam AI also offers intelligent support for research, language learning, and text analysis, powered by machine-learning models for translation, OCR, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech. It enables users to engage with Tibetan content more efficiently and interactively and it now supports 9 languages, expanding its accessibility to a wider audience.
Geshe Lobsang Monlam, the founder-CEO of Monlam Tibetan IT Research Centre, outlined his vision for the next decade, saying the Centre aimed to rely on the power of Monlam AI from 2025 to 2035 to integrate Tibetan religion, culture, and modern knowledge into the world’s technological progression.