Grab Superapp Says AI Models Struggle to Understand Asian Languages

Grab says it built its own lightweight vision model after finding both proprietary and open-source AI systems struggled with Southeast Asian languages, leading to errors and high latency in document processing. The move underscores a broader concern: frontier models from firms like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic still lack robust multilingual support, especially for low-resource or minority languages, limiting real-world accessibility and reliability.