Vietnam has entered the race in Asia to develop generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs tailored to local languages and cultures, aiming to reduce reliance on services provided by US tech companies.
Vingroup, a Vietnamese conglomerate, garnered significant attention with the launch of ViGPT, a generative AI program that interacts with users in Vietnamese. Developed by Vingroup’s subsidiary VinBigData (VBD), ViGPT is believed to be Vietnam’s first publicly available homegrown generative AI program.
The global market for generative AI is rapidly expanding, with an estimated annual growth rate of 42%. It is projected to reach USD 1.3 trillion by 2032, a significant increase from the USD 40 billion scale observed in 2022. Leading the way in this market are US tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon.com, benefiting from substantial resources and talent.
Vingroup has chosen to independently develop its own AI program due to its ability to utilize Vietnamese data, enabling ViGPT to offer more precise results than foreign counterparts. Vu Ha Van, a professor of mathematics at Yale University and scientific director at VBD, highlighted that many existing generative AI programs primarily rely on English data, resulting in reduced accuracy when it comes to Vietnamese culture, history, and laws.
ViGPT’s large language model (LLM) is constructed with 1.6 billion parameters, which is smaller compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4. However, ViGPT has demonstrated impressive performance, outperforming numerous overseas rivals and achieving a score second only to ChatGPT according to the Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding benchmark customized for the Vietnamese market.
Vingroup is integrating AI technology into various sectors, including electric vehicles produced by group company VinFast, allowing drivers to operate vehicles through verbal commands in Vietnamese. Additionally, the group plans to implement AI in finance, insurance, and logistics.
(Source: Nikkei Asia)
