YTL AI Labs launches ILMUcode, offers coding credits to 800 UM students
YTL AI Labs has launched ILMUcode, an AI-powered coding platform, with 800 first-year Universiti Malaya (UM) students set to receive RM100 in credits monthly for three months. UM is the first university in Malaysia to introduce the platform, which combines an agentic AI coding assistant with the ILM
PETALING JAYA (Oct 2): YTL AI Labs has launched ILMUcode, an artificial intelligence-powered coding platform, with 800 first-year students at Universiti Malaya (UM) set to receive credits to use it during the new semester.
Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abd Kadir officiated at the launch at UM on Oct 1. In a statement on Thursday, YTL AI Labs said UM is the first university in Malaysia to introduce ILMUcode to its students. The 800 students, from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, will each receive RM100 in credits monthly for three months, or up to RM300 per student.
ILMUcode combines an agentic AI coding assistant with ILMU-GLM-5.3, a model built in partnership with Z.ai and the latest addition to YTL AI Labs’ ILMU family. According to the company, the platform is designed to help developers, students and aspiring software builders understand codebases, write and modify code, troubleshoot problems and turn ideas into working software.
YTL AI Labs said ILMUcode provides access to coding capabilities through sovereign AI infrastructure and ranks among the world’s leading coding models on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE. “We are proud that Universiti Malaya is the first university in Malaysia to give our computer science students access to the next generation of frontier AI coding via ILMUcode. Through ILMUcode, we are equipping Malaysia’s next generation of technology builders and strengthening our Malaysian AI talent pipeline,” said UM vice-chancellor Datuk Seri Prof Ir Dr Noor Azuan Abu Osman.
YTL AI Labs CEO Foong Chee Mun said the ILMU family combines locally developed AI capabilities with technologies from international partners, including Nvidia and Z.ai, while retaining sovereign infrastructure. “With the launch of ILMUcode, we are equipping Malaysians with frontier AI not just to use it, but to build with AI and contribute to Malaysia’s ambition to become an AI nation,” he said.
The company said its flagship multimodal model tops the MalayMMLU benchmark for Bahasa Melayu. The ILMU family also includes speech recognition, text-to-speech and embedding models. Its agentic ILMU-Nemo models, built on Nvidia Nemotron open models through a partnership with Nvidia, power ILMUclaw, which is designed to enable users to build autonomous AI agents, the company added.
Z.ai co-founder and chief scientist Prof Jie Tang said the partnership aims to make advanced AI capabilities accessible to Malaysian developers. “Our mission is to make frontier AI accessible to builders around the world. Through our partnership with YTL AI Labs on ILMUcode, we are putting that mission into action with Malaysia’s next generation,” he said. ILMUcode joins YTL AI Labs’ existing products, including ILMUclaw and ILMUchat, a conversational AI application available through the Apple App Store and Google Play.
