Digital illustrations of a glowing world map with “AI” text on multiple continents represent the global presence and integration of artificial intelligence.
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As AI becomes more democratized, it is important for emerging economies to establish their own “sovereign AI”. East Science and Technology Conference Friday in Bangkok, Thailand.
Typically, sovereign AI refers to a country’s ability to control its own AI technology, data and related infrastructure, thereby ensuring strategic autonomy while meeting its unique priorities and security needs.
However, according to Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at SCB 10X, the technology investment arm of Thailand SCBX Group, this sovereignty has been lacking. He noted that many of the world’s most outstanding large language models operated by companies such as humans and OpenAI are based on English.
“The way you think, the way you interact with the world, the way you speak another language can be very different,” Tarnpipich said.
Therefore, it is important for a country to have its AI system, develop technology for a specific language, culture and country, rather than just translating English-based models.
The panelists agreed that the total population of digital ASEAN region is nearly 700 million, especially in establishing its sovereign AI. People under 35 put on makeup About 61% of the population, and 125,000 new users Access the Internet every day.
In view of this situation, ASEAN Managing Director Jeff Johnson Amazon “I think it’s really important, and we’re really focused on how to really make access to the cloud and AI,” the web service said.
Open source model
The key way a state can build a sovereign AI environment is to use an open source AI model, panelists said.
“In Southeast Asia and Thailand, there are a lot of amazing talent here. It’s shameful to have people captured in ways that are not publicly accessible or ecosystem development,” said Tharnpipitchai of SCB 10X.
He added that open source is a way to create “collective energy” to help Thailand better compete in AI and promote sovereignty in ways that are good for the entire country.
Open source usually refers to software that provides source code for free so that anyone can view, modify and redistribute it. LLM players, such as China’s DeepSeek and Meta’s Llama, advertised their models as open source, despite some restrictions.
Cecily Ng, vice president and general manager of Aspoft Software & Greation at Software Databricks, said the emergence of more open source models offers more options for companies and governments than relying on some closed models.
AI experts have Telled CNBC earlier The open source AI has helped China improve AI adoption, better develop its AI ecosystem and compete with the United States
Access calculation
Prem Pavan, vice president and general manager of Southeast Asia and South Korea at Red Hat, said that until recently, localization of AI has been focused on language. He added that sovereign access to AI models powered by local hardware and computing is even more important today.
For emerging countries like Thailand, AI localization can be provided through cloud computing companies with domestic operations, panel members said. These include large global standards such as AWS, Microsoft azure and Tencent Cloud and sovereign players such as AIS Cloud and True IDC.
“We are in Thailand and across Southeast Asia to support businesses of all industries, shapes and sizes from the smallest startups to the largest businesses,” said Johnson of AWS.
He added that the economic model of the company’s cloud services makes it easy to “pay for the goods you use”, reducing barriers to entry and making it very easy to build models and applications.
United Nations Trade and Development Agency in April in Report AI is expected to reach a market value of US$4.8 trillion by 2033. However, it warns that the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated and that the country is at risk of lagging behind.
Unctad’s advice to the international community to promote inclusive growth is a plan to share AI infrastructure, use open source AI models and share AI knowledge and resources.
