Vietnam is, to some extent, ahead of many other countries in terms of artificial intelligence (AI) as the Ministry of Information and Communications has proposed a law to heavily rely on open source platforms, which is supposed the best possible strategy, particularly for AI, Yann LeCun, a French-American pioneer in AI and machine learning, said during an interview with Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Saturday.

LeCun, who is also chief AI scientist at Meta, said he had recommended Vietnam invest in research and education as well as embrace open source platforms during a meeting with Vietnam’s Party General Secretary To Lam the previous day.

AI is going to become a kind of infrastructure, specifically communication infrastructure, similar to the Internet, which is built based on open source software. 

Therefore, Vietnam should play an important role in contributing to a sort of large frontier models that would be trained with all the data, languages, cultures, and value systems in the world, LeCun suggested.

He added that the job cannot be done by a single company or a single entity in a single country. That has to be done in a distributed manner across the world.

Vietnam, along with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, Japan, and India, should form an international partnership to train an AI foundation model that speaks all the languages in the world, the expert claimed.

To develop meaningful AI technology or to make meaningful contributions to AI research, Vietnam needs AI-focused data centers based on GPUs, LeCun told Tuoi Tre, adding that Vietnam has recently announced an agreement with Nvidia in which the latter would open an AI research and development center and an AI data center in the Southeast Asian country.

AI data centers are costly but a crucial component, he affirmed.

Developing simultaneously both semiconductor, hardware, and software will help create advantages in working on the entire chain.

The AI expert said one of the big challenges of the next few years is bringing down the cost of running AI assistants as operating an AI assistant is expensive computationally. In order to serve the 100 million Vietnamese population, it should be cheap. 

As a result, Vietnam needs specialized hardware that can take charge of the job efficiently.

“Vietnam perhaps has a role to play there. Not just the hardware itself, but also the low-level firmware and software to run on this,” according to LeCun.

Meta’s expert said that a key factor driving large corporations to invest in AI in Vietnam is the availability of talent.

However, talent often emerges only when a country actively creates opportunities for its development.

Establishing research labs can inspire students to pursue education and careers in those labs, creating a virtuous cycle where research institutions motivate learning and technological advancement, explained LeCun.

He further noted that the larger the pool of educated students, the more appealing the country becomes for companies looking to establish research centers.

Yann LeCun is among the winners of the US$3 million VinFuture Grand Prize in 2024, besides Prof. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist; Prof. Geoffrey E. Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist; Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the U.S.-based chipmaker Nvidia; and Prof. Fei-Fei Li, a Chinese-American AI researcher.

Vietnam boosts AI, semiconductor ecosystem development

Receiving president and CEO of U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Jensen Huang on Friday, Vietnam’s Party General Secretary To Lam voiced his hope that Nvidia will continue supporting Vietnam’s AI ecosystem, enhancing the country's technological self-reliance.

He affirmed that Vietnam considers Nvidia a leading strategic partner in semiconductor and AI, pledging to create the most favorable conditions for the two sides’ effective collaboration.

On September 21, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh signed decisions to promulgate a human resource development program for the semiconductor industry and the national strategy for semiconductor industry development.

In 2021, the prime minister also issued the national strategy on AI research, development, and application until 2030.

At a seminar in early October this year, Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung affirmed that the country had established a large AI and semiconductor ecosystem with the participation of large groups, such as Google, Meta, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and others.

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