Pakistan, June 6 -- For years, asking Urdu of a large language model was an exercise in mild humiliation. The Nastaliq script came back garbled, when it appeared at all; more often, the system silently swapped it for a stiff Arabic Naskh that no Pakistani reader would recognise as their own. Idioms were rendered literal. Anyone who tried to use these tools in their own tongue learned to switch to English, or to give up. The productivity dividend the rest of the world was quietly receiving was happening in a language the majority of us do not think in.

That is beginning to shift, and the shift matters more than it appears.

This year, a Pakistani researcher named Taimoor Hassan released Qalb, the largest language model built so far for Ur...