A Pakistani developer, Junaid Ahmed, has created Qehwa AI, the world’s first large language model (LLM) and chatbot designed specifically for Pashto speakers. Built to serve over 60 million users, the model focuses on the Peshawari dialect and addresses gaps in global AI systems when handling Pashto language and cultural context. Developed using Qwen2.5-7B, the system was trained on 3.4 million Pashto documents and fine-tuned with over 100,000 instruction pairs. It achieved an overall accuracy of 85.3% across 150 benchmark tests, with strong performance in translation, culture, and daily life topics. The project was completed independently without funding, with support from open-source platforms like Hugging Face. Qehwa AI is now available as a free, open-source tool, marking a major step forward for regional language AI development.
