The AI boom is being driven by two languages: English and Mandarin Chinese. The leading AI developers—OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, and others—are almost all based in either the U.S. or mainland China, and so their models perform best in their native tongues.
That leaves countless other languages and dialects, even those spoken by tens of millions of people, by the wayside.
“The whole AI revolution is in English and Mandarin,” says Pak-Sun Ting, CEO of Votee AI, a Hong Kong-based startup that’s striving to build AI models for Cantonese and other neglected tongues. “There’s only a very small fraction that represents other languages.”
Votee is one of a growing number of companies that are trying to tackle AI’s neglect of other languages. It takes open-weight models from developers like Meta and Alibaba, retrains them on Cantonese data, and sells the result to banks, universities, and government departments.
“It’s more than just culture. Cantonese is used in education, healthcare, and police communications,” Ting says. “If those don’t get covered, then AI is essentially useless.”
