The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (Nectec) has teamed up with three organisations to launch the Open ThaiGPT project, which is a next-generation form of artificial intelligence (AI) using the Thai language.
The three organisations are the Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneur Association of Thailand (AIEAT), the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand (AIAT) and the NSTDA Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC).
The Open ThaiGPT project offers a customisable chat-based assistant with state-of-the-art AI technology and the capability of understanding the Thai language.
It is to be distributed as a free, open source and customisable software package.
The project would soft launch the Open ThaiGPT 0.1.0 -alpha in May.
This release is capable of answering questions, machine translation, step-by-step explanation, paraphrasing, unit conversion, coding suggestion and numerical sorting.
Version 1.0 of the ThaiGPT will available by June of this year.
The datasets used in this project come from publicly available sources.
One of the current data donators is Pantip.com. As always, with the Personal Data Protection Act regulations and copyright in mind, the project has invited more data donators to collaborate and join the project.
"This is the right time for Thailand to become a technology maker rather than a good technology user like previously, in particular in the area of generative artificial intelligence by having the Open ThaiGPT project," said Thepchai Supnithi, director for the Artificial Intelligence Research Group of Nectec and a representative of AIAT, at a seminar hosted by Nectec on Monday entitled 'Challenges, possibilities, and opportunities for Thai ChatGPT'.
"This is the right time for Thailand as we have much of our own local language data and Asean's largest supercomputer facility to process that massive volume of data," said Mr Thepchai.
Kobkrit Viriyayudhakorn, president of the AIEAT, added Open Chat ThaiGPT focuses on a Thai language chat-based assistant that understands tasks and can interact with third party systems. Thai GPT can be the foundation for developing the next-generation AI for Thai language processing and can be applied by businesses applications, he said.
Prachya Bookwan, Nectec researcher for natural language processing, said the ThaiGPT is run by a large scale high performance computing model but in the future it could work on a smartphone.
In the future AI will be augmented intelligence with human trained data to make AI much more intelligent.
Wanchat Padungrat, the founder of Pantip.com, said Pantip is willing to make the research more simple and have a positive impact on society.
Viwan Jarerattanachat, head of scientific support and domain research at ThaiSC, said this project would raise the overall AI capabilities in Thailand.
However, as it is still a case of trial and error, it needs to review safety to ensure it will not harm people or be misused. The project would have to have transparency, accountability and responsibility, she said.
Chai Wutitiwatchai, executive director of Nectec, said AI is an important area. Thailand has a National AI stragegy master plan which was approved by the cabinet last year.
The country's AI Government Readiness Index position improved from 60th in 2020 to 31st in 2022.
