Taiwan-developed generative AI system to expand applications: Premier

Taipei, May 23 (CNA) Taiwan's self-built large language model, TAIDE, will have its application fields further expanded in the future to accelerate improvements in industry productivity and public sector efficiency, according to Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) on Thursday.

Citing the premier, Cabinet spokesperson Chen Shi-kai (陳世凱) said at a press conference that as an indispensable partner in the global semiconductor supply chain, Taiwan must keep up with artificial intelligence (AI) developments in order to maintain its key strategic position going forward.

TAIDE, which stands for Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine, was initiated by the Cabinet-level National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in April 2023 to create a foundational model for a traditional Chinese generative AI dialogue engine specifically for Taiwan.

According to an NSTC report on TAIDE presented during a Cabinet meeting in the morning, a TAIDE model based on Meta's Llama 2 (Large Language Model Meta AI) model (TAIDE-LX-7B) was released for commercial use on April 15, and another version for research only (TAIDE-LX-13B) has also been released.

Both models have excelled in a variety of tasks, such as English to Chinese-language translations, with results comparable to Open AI's ChatGPT 3.5, the council said.

It also added that the TAIDE team are currently working with industries and academia to develop diversified applications, including agricultural knowledge searches and a Taiwanese Hokkien-English AI chatbot for elementary and junior high schools.

While the locally-developed traditional Chinese generative AI system is worthy of recognition, the NSTC will continue to improve on TAIDE's AI technology and applications in the future, the Cabinet spokesperson cited Cho as saying at the press event.