Iran was ranked among the world’s rising startup ecosystems as recently as last year. A year later, it is in the middle of a conflict, and a weeks-long internet shutdown is choking off the local economy and freezing tech activity.
“We cannot do most tasks,” an Iranian engineer who works with Digikala, the country’s largest e-commerce company, told Rest of World. He requested anonymity for fear of government retaliation. “The company is trying to create a local LLM [large language…

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