The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday said it would lead the development of Taiwan’s sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) by boosting the combined computing speed of the nation’s supercomputers to 480 petaflops by 2029.
AI sovereignty refers to a country’s full autonomy over AI technologies and infrastructure, including the development of models, control and protection of data, and ensuring computing efficiency, NSTC Deputy Minister Lin Faa-jeng (林法正) said.
The NSTC’s goal is to reduce Taiwan’s dependence on external technologies and services, he said.
Photo: Wu Po-hsuan, Taipei Times
Last year, 80 percent of corporate chief executive officers recognized AI’s influence, while 57 percent included AI in their development strategies, Lin said, citing data from Gartner, a US technological research and consulting firm.
Taiwan’s domestic demand for AI is increasing every year, including large-scale language model training, climate change research, healthcare innovations, smart manufacturing and integrated circuit layout, he said, adding that the council has commissioned the National Center for High-Performance Computing to procure supercomputers to reach the necessary computing speed for AI, he added.
One type of supercomputer is driven by regular CPUs, including Taiwania 3 and Forerunner 1, which can reach 2.7 petaflops and 3.5 petaflops respectively, he said.
Another type is GPU-powered supercomputers such as Taiwania 2 and the Trustworthy AI Dialog Engine (TAIDE) language model, capable of 5.9 petaflops and 3.8 petaflops respectively, Lin said.
Cloud services and technology platforms would also be built to promote Taiwan’s academic research development, industrial applications and international competitiveness in the AI field, he added.
Additionally, the council plans to launch a scheme to construct next-generation high-speed host computers under the Taiwan Chip-based Industrial Innovation Program, Lin said.
The scheme aims for supercomputers’ combined computing speed to reach 280 petaflops by 2028, he added.
More AI supercomputers would be installed under the “Southern Silicon Valley” project to add another 200 petaflops from next year to 2029, Lin said.
The combined computing speed of supercomputers would thus reach 480 petaflops within the next five years, he added.
ChatGPT has shown the power of generative AI and the importance of sovereignty over the technology since its launch in 2022, he said.
Sixty to 70 percent of mainstream AI models are trained in English, and most of the ones in Mandarin use simplified Chinese, Lin said.
The construction of TAIDE would ensure the nation’s competitiveness by developing a model in Traditional Chinese, he said.
The center would not only create high-efficiency supercomputers based on GPUs, but also build a reliable cloud data environment, ensuring the safety of sensitive medical data, such as people’s genomes or health records, Lin added.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
RSS