Buy versus Build an LLM: A Decision Framework for Governments

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a new frontier of digital infrastructure that can support a wide range of public-sector applications, from general purpose citizen services to specialized and sensitive state functions. When expanding AI access, governments face a set of strategic choices over whether to buy existing services, build domestic capabilities, or adopt hybrid approaches across different domains and use cases. These are critical decisions especially when leading model providers are often foreign corporations, and LLM outputs are increasingly treated as trusted inputs to public decision-making and public discourse. In practice, these decisions are not intended to mandate a single approach across all domains; instead, national AI strategies are typically pluralistic, with sovereign, commercial and open-source models coexisting to serve different purposes. Governments may rely on commercial models for non-sensitive or commodity tasks, while pursuing greater control for critical, high-risk or strategically important applications. This paper provides a strategic framework for making this decision by evaluating these options across dimensions including sovereignty, safety, cost, resource capability, cultural fit, and sustainability. Importantly, "building" does not imply that governments must act alone: domestic capabilities may be developed through public research institutions, universities, state-owned enterprises, joint ventures, or broader national ecosystems. By detailing the technical requirements and practical challenges of each pathway, this work aims to serve as a reference for policy-makers to determine whether a buy or build approach best aligns with their specific national needs and societal goals.

SEA-BED: Southeast Asia Embedding Benchmark

Sentence embeddings are essential for NLP tasks such as semantic search, re-ranking, and textual similarity. Although multilingual benchmarks like MMTEB broaden coverage, Southeast Asia (SEA) datasets are scarce and often machine-translated, missing native linguistic properties. With nearly 700 million speakers, the SEA region lacks a region-specific embedding benchmark. We introduce SEA-BED, the first large-scale SEA embedding benchmark with 169 datasets across 9 tasks and 10 languages, where 71% are formulated by humans, not machine generation or translation. We address three research questions: (1) which SEA languages and tasks are challenging, (2) whether SEA languages show unique performance gaps globally, and (3) how human vs. machine translations affect evaluation. We evaluate 17 embedding models across six studies, analyzing task and language challenges, cross-benchmark comparisons, and translation trade-offs. Results show sharp ranking shifts, inconsistent model performance among SEA languages, and the importance of human-curated datasets for low-resource languages like Burmese.

SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.