Chief information officer (CIO) of Taiwan Mobile Rock Tsai stated that the era headlined by mobile devices already concluded in 2020. From now until 2040, AI will be the driving force that dominates the tech industry. Currently, the group is participating in related projects through TWSC (Taiwan Web Service Corporation). He also hopes that Taiwan can invest more resources to develop an AI computing pool ecosystem.
Tsai was previously the head of technology for DBS Taiwan. In 2022, he joined Taiwan Mobile as CIO. Born in Vietnam, he is also assigned the mission to expand the Southeast Asia market.
On July 19, at a future technology industry summit, Tsai mentioned that AI will follow the mobile device era and be the major technology trend for the next 20 years.
He believes that ChatGPT has made people realize that the progress of AI may be faster than expected. It has already shown important elements of human intelligence, which is the ability to induce, infer, and create. As the most crucial "self-consciousness" element, as many neuroscientists have stated, AI self-consciousness doesn't exist yet. It's merely a mirage created by the memory continuum.
Regarding how corporations can respond to the arrival of the AI "singularity," Tsai shared a five-layer response plan.
First, management needs to think about how to enable IT and non-IT employees with AI. For instance, starting in early 2023, Taiwan Mobile allowed all IT employees to use ChatGPT to increase their daily productivity.
Second, the group took stock of internal and external information systems. Then, it planned to see what changes will occur when an AI brain is integrated. It's expected to improve internal systems like knowledge management, as well as external systems like text-based customer support.
Third, corporations can consider leveraging foundation models to fine-tune their own large-scale language models (LLM). For example, ASUS's TWSC has released the Formosa Langauge Model.
The fourth step can be participating in some national-level projects. The final and ultimate layer is whether or not Taiwan's industries can collectively establish an "AI computing power pool."
Tsai emphasized that the AI computing power pool is a different field compared to the existing three major cloud service providers. An AI computing pool requires high-density computing power. The current generation uses GPUs, but in the future, it might use different chips such as IPUs (infrastructure processing units) and NPUs (network processing units).
He explained that the focus of the three major cloud service providers is on reaching end-users everywhere. Therefore, they need to build or rent server rooms in many locations, similar to the concept of "plumbing."
In contrast, an AI computing pool doesn't need an internet connection. It concentrates computing power internally for training models. Therefore, the existing advantages of the three major cloud providers won't be important for the AI computing demand of the new era.
Taiwan's cloud service market is still dominated by foreign companies like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud right now. Local telecom cloud service providers face numerous challenges when attempting to expand their market share.
Tsai stated that the three major cloud service providers have global infrastructure advantages and have deep cultivations in different market segments. For instance, AWS has significant influences in startup circles. Microsoft focuses on the 2B (to business) market, while Google is strong in the 2C (to consumer) market.
Through its investment in CloudMile, Taiwan Mobile plans to expand its cloud service offerings. Besides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it can make innovations in platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).
Article translated by Jack Wu
