FPT & Canada’s Mila Institute join hands to advance responsible AI

FPT, Vietnam’s largest IT service provider, and Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, announced on June 5 the renewal of a three-year strategic partnership agreement, introduced within the Canada - Vietnam AI Summit and commemorating the 50th anniversary of the two countries’ bilateral relationship.

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

According to Mr. Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s Founder and Scientific Director, the Mila community has benefited greatly from the relationship with FPT over the past three years, which has resulted in the realization of many projects. “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.”

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

As part of this continued commitment, FPT and Mila will explore cooperation on research projects related to large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) while promoting responsible artificial intelligence (AI), an approach to employ AI with good intentions to empower people and organizations.

Both sides will also 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.

“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.”

With strategic consultation from Mila, FPT has established the first and largest AI Research Hub, in Quy Nhon, south-central Binh Dinh province. With 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 on people, facilities, infrastructure, data, and research to strengthen its AI capabilities. The corporation now boasts an ecosystem of AI-enabled products and services with over 200 million monthly end-users, and plans to integrate AI into all offerings to provide an unparalleled experience to customers.