FPT and Mila renew partnership to collaborate on AI projects

FPT, supposedly Vietnam’s largest IT service provider, and Mila, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, announced the renewal of a three-year strategic partnership agreement.

As part of this continued commitment, FPT and Mila will explore collaboration on research projects related to large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) while promoting Responsible AI, an approach to employ artificial intelligence with good intentions to empower people and organizations. Both sides will contribute to developing guidelines, best practices, and ethical standards that will promote transparency, fairness, accountability, and privacy in AI applications. The continued partnership seeks to solve complex problems and pioneer an AI ecosystem that fosters sustainable growth, human development, and social progress.

The partnership expansion was introduced at the Canada – Vietnam AI Summit, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the two countries’ bilateral relationship. An overview of an AI-enabled future and efforts to make technology beneficial and safe for human lives were discussed among conference participants, including members of the Canadian and Vietnamese governments, scientists, and leaders from Mila, FPT, and FPT’s partners in North America.

FPT Chairman Dr Truong Gia Binh said: “As a global IT company, FPT aspires to harness Artificial Intelligence’s power for a safer, better, and happier world.”

Since the beginning of the partnership in June 2020, FPT and Mila have collaborated on multiple research projects on causality, language models, voice coding, and more.

“The Mila community has benefited greatly from our relationship with FPT over the past three years, which has resulted in the realization of many projects,” said Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s Founder and Scientific Director. “We are delighted to continue our collaboration with FPT, one of our major partners in Asia, which is a great example of Mila’s international impact.”

FPT Software, a global IT services provider in the FPT ecosystem, has contributed significantly to the corporation’s AI uptake efforts with several R&D and talent development initiatives.

“As Mila’s first partner in Southeast Asia, we are proud to collaborate in core research areas such as healthcare, environment, climate change, and AI ethics to deliver positive impacts on enterprises and society,” said Dr. Phong Nguyen, FPT Software’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer.

“The partnership enables FPT Software to expand opportunities for Vietnamese engineers to access the world’s latest breakthroughs and inventions as well as use their knowledge, talent, and creativity to contribute to the growth of Vietnam as a worldclass AI hub,” Phong added.

With strategic consultation from Mila, FPT has established the first and largest AI Research Hub in Quy Nhon, Vietnam. With an investment of over $85 million, the complex will be a research, development, and learning facility for 20,000 tech personnel. Since 2013, FPT has made significant expenditures in people, facilities, infrastructure, data, and research to strengthen its AI capabilities. The corporation now boasts an ecosystem of AIenabled products and services with over 200 million monthly end-users and plans to integrate AI into all offerings to provide an unparalleled experience to its customers.