Hong Kong's Votee AI is taking on English and Mandarin's AI dominance with a Cantonese model | Fortune

Votee AI, a Hong Kong startup led by Pak-Sun Ting, is taking aim at the dominance of English and Mandarin models by building large language models for Cantonese. Ting says most major developers—OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai and others—perform best in their native languages, leaving many others sidelined. Votee AI retrains open-weight models from Meta and Alibaba on Cantonese data, selling outputs to banks, universities and government departments. The article highlights Cantonese’s distinct grammar and vocabulary versus Mandarin, and notes that benchmarks and training resources have been thin for colloquial writing. Votee reports expanding Cantonese tokens from 100 million to over 500 million using scraping, community data, universities and synthetic datasets.