Launching the program "Vietnam Innovation Challenge 2025"

The Vietnam Innovation Challenge 2025 marks the third year of the program, which aims to promote the development of the AI ​​sector in Vietnam. From 2022, the program will attract more than 750 solutions from over 20 countries and territories each year.

During the visit of US President Biden to Vietnam in 2023, the “Vietnam Innovation Challenge” was evaluated by the White House Portal as a highlight of technology and innovation cooperation between Vietnam and the US. This year's program focuses on the ViGen Project with an effort to create a high-quality open-source Vietnamese dataset for training and evaluation.

This will improve the efficiency of large language models (LLMs), helping AI models better understand culture, context, and expressions in Vietnamese. This project is expected to increase the presence of Vietnamese in the AI ​​development process, while contributing to the rapid and sustainable development of the digital economy.

Press conference to announce the program "Vietnam Innovation Challenge 2025".

The ViGen project originated from a tripartite partnership between Meta Group, NIC and AI for Vietnam. NIC acts as the project manager, coordinator and ensures that the project is consistent with Vietnam’s national goals. AI for Vietnam is the project implementation partner with technical and financial support from Meta Group.

Strategic partners include Nvidia, Viettel, and the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology. The mission of the ViGen Project is to enable AI models to support Vietnamese naturally and comprehensively from the ground up to unlock the potential of AI applications in Vietnam.

ViGen will build large-scale, high-quality open-source Vietnamese datasets to train and evaluate the capabilities of AI models. The project also contributes to ensuring that AI development in Vietnam is consistent with Vietnamese cultural values ​​and ethical standards, aiming to build a locally relevant and responsible open-source AI ecosystem.

Sharing about the program's objectives at the press conference announcing the "Vietnam Innovation Challenge 2025" program, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Chi Dung said that "Vietnam Innovation Challenge" is a strategic program to seek innovative solutions worldwide to address important national challenges, towards a prosperous and sustainable Vietnam.

“For the program to be successful, it requires cooperation between the public sector, the private sector, and domestic and foreign partners to join hands to form, test, and implement innovative initiatives for a prosperous Vietnam,” said Mr. Dung.

Professor Yann LeCun - Vice President, Chief AI Architect of Meta Group, who is known as one of the fathers of AI, commented: "The ViGen project and the "Vietnam Innovation Challenge" not only aim to promote technology but also aim to build a comprehensive AI future, honoring and integrating Vietnam's unique cultural and linguistic heritage".

Mr. Tran Viet Hung - Founder, CEO AI NIC and Meta's support is fully aligned with the Open and Trust Data Initiative (OTDI) of the AI ​​Alliance.

The project will contribute to the community large and high-quality datasets in Vietnamese to improve the current status of Vietnamese, which is considered a language with a very modest presence in AI," said Mr. Hung.

Also at the press conference, Meta, in collaboration with Deloitte, chose Vietnam as the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to launch a handbook titled "Innovating in the public sector in Asia-Pacific with open source AI: Unlocking breakthrough potential with Liama".

Ha Anh