Zalo CTO: “Vietnamese people can master large language models”

(Dan Tri) - Towards the era of national development, Zalo has joined the Au Lac AI alliance with more than 20 units including state agencies, enterprises and universities to promote the goal of developing and mastering technology, especially in the field of artificial intelligence.

With the participation of leading technology units and technology startups such as MobiFone, VNPT, FPT, CMC , Zalo... along with many universities and academies, Vietnam has an AI Alliance, joining hands to develop strategic technology for national digital sovereignty.

Mr. Nguyen Minh Tu - Zalo Technology Director - and representatives of units at the launching ceremony of Au Lac AI Alliance.

Accordingly, the Au Lac AI Alliance will focus on three main areas: research and development; building standards and policies on AI; training. In the field of research and development, members will jointly develop large language models LLM with the ability to process Vietnamese accurately, naturally, in accordance with Vietnamese culture and identity, contributing to improving people's knowledge and promoting the national economy .

Speaking at the alliance launch ceremony, Mr. Nguyen Minh Tu - Zalo Technology Director - affirmed his desire to contribute not only to the development of LLM but also to Vietnam's technological sovereignty .

“By joining the Au Lac AI Alliance, we hope to contribute to the development of large language models LLM in Vietnam. As a unit that has succeeded in building the LLM model, Zalo hopes to create quality AI products, serving Vietnamese people in a practical way, as well as contributing to the country's scientific and technological development process,” said Mr. Tu.

Mr. Nguyen Minh Tu - Zalo Technology Director - spoke at the launching event of Au Lac AI Alliance.

Mr. Tu also said that joining the alliance affirms Zalo's determination to be self-sufficient in technology and master AI: "We believe that Vietnamese people can master the LLM model in Vietnamese. At the same time, Zalo wants to join hands to create an open and transparent AI community to stimulate creativity and widely apply AI."

Currently, Zalo is one of the few units in Vietnam that has successfully developed a large language model (LLM) using the from-scratch model method. This option requires creating a model architecture, initializing parameters, processing data, and training the model from the processed data set, said a Zalo representative.

This decision is not to compete with foreign giants but to realize the Vietnamese people's aspiration to master a purely Vietnamese LLM model, understand Vietnamese and serve Vietnamese people.

By the end of 2024, Zalo's LLM model will surpass big names such as GPT-4 (OpenAI), Gemma2-9B (Google) or Phi-3-small (Microsoft).

Thanks to its flexible strategy, Zalo has successfully shortened the development time of the LLM model from 18 months to 6 months. At the end of 2023, the first model KiLM 7B parameters were launched at the Zalo AI Summit event. Based on the VMLU (Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding Benchmark Suite for Large Language Models) evaluation platform, the KiLM 7B model achieved 1.5 times the capacity of OpenAPI's ChatGPT-3.5 on the public VMLU test set.

By the end of 2024, Zalo's 13B parameter model surpassed big names such as GPT-4 (OpenAI), Gemma2-9B (Google) or Phi-3-small (Microsoft), second only to Meta's LlaMA-70B model in terms of VMLU's Vietnamese processing ability.

In the future, Zalo will continue to research and improve the LLM model, as well as promote the practical application of LLM in the lives of millions of Vietnamese users. Zalo's successful development of Vietnamese LLM is not only a breakthrough for a business, but also opens up a potential future for Vietnamese artificial intelligence.

Joining the Au Lac AI alliance clearly demonstrates Zalo's determination to develop AI in a safe and responsible manner, serving the interests of the community and national sovereignty.

The establishment of the Alliance not only opens a new chapter for the journey of AI development in Vietnam, but also promises a bright future, where technology practically serves the community, is linked to national interests and contributes to affirming Vietnam's independence and sovereignty on the global technology map.

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/kinh-doanh/giam-doc-cong-nghe-zalo-nguoi-viet-co-the-lam-chu-mo-hinh-ngon-ngu-lon-20250625124118535.htm