AI Taiwan

The National Science and Technology Council’s Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE), regarded as Taiwan’s version of ChatGPT, has released an update for the first time in 10 months. The update, released this February, is a commercial TAIDE 8B model based on Meta’s openly available foundation model Llama 3.1.

Meta has already released Llama version 3.4, but according to The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)’s National Center for High-Performance Computing Deputy Director General Yao Chin-min (姚志民) it’s impossible for Taiwan to follow each update. Yao said careful evaluation is needed to determine whether or not they should retrain the model after such updates.

The TAIDE model has been downloaded over 170,000 times, with its more well-known applications including the Taiwanese and English-learning robot at the National University of Tainan and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University’s Taiwanese and Hakka chat platform, according to NSTC.

The council says it’s in the process of developing an application that can generate Mandarin Chinese language-teaching material as well as an application for medical and health topics. NSTC said they’re still optimizing models through collecting more data and testing results.

NSTC shared that TAIDE released the TAIDE LX-7B (commercial version) and TAIDE LX-13B (academic and research version) models based on Llama 2 in April 2024, then a commercial TAIDE 8B model based on Llama 3 May 2024. The most current update, issued this February, is another commercial TAIDE 8B model based on Llama 3.1.

Regarding whether or not the recent cuts to NSTC’s budget will impact the TAIDE project, the center noted that financial support is required for data acquisition and model development, and that the cuts will affect the effectiveness of the project’s implementation.

Date: 2025-2-12
Source: RTI (Radio Taiwan International)