B80-million Thai-language AI project launched

The government is preparing to launch a new Thai large language model (LLM) project intended to secure artificial intelligence (AI) sovereignty and drive the country’s digital economy.

The 80-million-baht project is meant to build a foundational AI infrastructure in Thailand that deeply understands the Thai language, culture and context, said Patchara Anuntasilpa, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES).

“Digital technology and AI are no longer merely support tools. They are becoming fundamental, a digital infrastructure for the future,” he said on Wednesday.

The DES ministry has partnered with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation to launch the ThaiLLM Foundation Model.

The development of ThaiLLM is regarded as an urgent economic necessity, Mr Patchara said. While Thai GDP growth has slowed to 1-2%, the digital economy has recorded steady growth of 3-4%, helping to drive the economy.

“Our goal is to build the national AI infrastructure for the country,” he said.

To rapidly accelerate AI skills in the workforce, the ministry is preparing to distribute 5 million premium AI service rights, including global platforms and ThaiLLM, to various sectors within a year.

He said the real-world usage data generated from this massive rollout will be fed back into ThaiLLM to perfect the model.

“Having a national model significantly reduces costs for government agencies and businesses, including startups, to build self-hosted applications as developers will not be burdened by token fees, allowing rapid, cost-effective scaling,” said Tiranee Achalakul, president of the Big Data Institute.

Rather than competing with global tech giants via billion-dollar investments, ThaiLLM focuses on local context, performing when queried about Thai laws, culture, and specific localised knowledge.

The project has established a National Data Bank, gathering data not only from web scraping, for which the Thai language accounts for less than 0.05% of the global internet, but also from significant contributions from government bodies such as the National Research Council of Thailand, the Office of the Council of State and the National Library.

ThaiLLM developed 8B and 30B foundation models under an open-licence and open-weight approach, enabling developers to download and build specialised, fine-tuned models.

The models are trained using public datasets and data contributed through collaborations across both public and private sectors, including legal, research, and news-related information within the Thai context.

The project is a cross-sector collaboration funded by the Digital Economy and Society Development Fund, with a budget of 80 million baht in fiscal 2024.

Nearly 8,000 developers are testing and using the platform’s application programming interfaces and chat sandboxes.

Real-world applications are already live, including a medical screening chatbot to give preliminary health advice and a tourism bot.

“This is state infrastructure preparing to be passed on for people to build upon for free,” said Ms Tiranee. “Ultimately, it should be able to advance faster because we have our own foundation.”

By using the LANTA supercomputer at the National Science and Technology Development Agency for local processing, Thailand can significantly reduce cloud costs while ensuring sensitive national data remains securely within the country, said Punpermsak Aruni, deputy permanent secretary of the higher education ministry.

The ministry is also mobilising AI researchers and specialists from 150 universities and six research institutions nationwide to refine datasets and strengthen the model’s understanding of complex Thai contexts, including government systems and legal frameworks.

It is also accelerating AI workforce development through new curricula and training programmes to prepare talent for the growing AI infrastructure.

Subscribe to our newsletters for daily updates, breaking news and exclusive content.

- KEYWORDS

- Thailand ai infrastructure

- Thaillm

- Digital economy thailand

- National data bank

- Artificial intelligence development

- Big data institute

- Digital economy and society development fund