FPT-Mila partnership agreement renewal ceremony at the Canada-Vietnam AI Summit.
Vietnam-based FPT have renewed their strategic partnership with Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) research institute Mila for another three years.
FPT and Mila will continue to collaborate on advancing AI capabilities by exploring projects that involve large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), while abiding by responsible AI practices.
The IT service provider is Mila’s first Southeast Asian partner and through their collaboration, they aim to build an AI ecosystem that “fosters sustainable growth, human development, and social progress”.
Furthermore, the alliance will work together to develop guidelines, best practices, as well as ethical standards around using AI applications.
Their partnership began in June 2020 and since then they have embarked on multiple research projects involving AI like causality, language models and voice coding.
“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 world-class AI hub.”
Their ongoing partnership has also helped FPT establish Vietnam’s first AI research hub, with Mila investing over US$85 million to support the development of the R&D complex and learning facility.
Announced in February this year, construction of the first phase is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2023.
The expanded partnership was signed at a recent Canada-Vietnam AI summit in Montreal.
“The Mila community has benefitted greatly from our relationship with FPT over the past three years, which has resulted in the realisation of many projects,” said Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director of Mila.
“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.”
