Quit job in the US, return to do free artificial intelligence for Vietnamese people

Working at many large artificial intelligence companies, directly participating in developing models such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and DALL-E 2, this young man still decided to return to his country to build an organization to support Vietnamese people in doing technology for free.

To date, Nguyen Hoang Quan (24 years old), co-founder of the non-profit organization VILM (HCMC), has launched 3 artificial intelligence (AI) models with more than 100,000 downloads per month and completely free for Vietnamese people.

Launching 3 AI products in one year

After studying in the US for more than 7 years, Nguyen Hoang Quan had the opportunity to work at OpenAI (USA) as a research engineer for the ChatGPT artificial intelligence model even though he had not graduated from university. After returning to Vietnam in 2022, he continued to work as a data engineer for Microsoft and OpenAI's Bing Chat product with an income of 5,000 USD/month (more than 120 million VND). However, this young man decided to quit his job to return to build an organization to support Vietnamese people to do technology for free.

In 1 year, Quan has created more than 3 AI models.

Photo: NVCC

"Vietnamese people are very good at AI, even ChatGPT has human resources participating in research, but keeping up with the current wave of ever-changing technology is not comparable to the world . Therefore, I want to establish an organization specializing in researching free AI models to support Vietnamese people in technology", Quan said. In June 2023, Quan co-founded VILM, and in a short time launched many free AI models, including: Vietcuna, VinaLlama, OpenHermes-2.5 and OpenHermes-2.5-Vision. "The Vietcuna Q&A AI model has reached 27,000 downloads since its launch in June 2023. VinaLlama, which was just created in December 2023, received more than 35,000 Q&A messages from users within 24 hours. OpenHermes-2.5 and OpenHermes-2.5-Vision have the same answering ability as ChatGPT and are applied in the field of robotics research," Quan shared. According to Quan, Vietnamese businesses can now download VinaLlama to become virtual assistants for customer care. OpenHermes-2.5 and OpenHermes-2.5-Vision are being used by more than 40 startups in Silicon Valley (USA). In the near future, Quan will launch a set of instructions for the VinaLlama language model so that users can use it for free. Quan said: "I make these products mainly for the community, hoping to support everyone to access modernity and quality that is not inferior to ChatGPT, Bing Chat. From there, researching and creating AI models later can be simpler," Quan said.

Dare to try new things

Talking about starting a business with AI technology, Quan said the biggest difficulty comes from convincing investors to ask for funding and use of materials. "When I brought the VinaLlama presentation board to investors, they were very skeptical about the success of the model. Therefore, I bet on using my own money to make a trial version to bring to the market. When the product is well received, investors will feel confident to invest capital," Quan said.

Quan wants to create more free artificial intelligence products for the community.

As someone who works with Hoang Quan, Pham Nhat Huy (22 years old), an artificial intelligence engineer at Zalo, shared: "Mr. Quan has been in the US for quite a long time, has an open personality, grasps new technologies, so he really likes to share his knowledge with everyone. When making artificial intelligence language models, Mr. Quan is very dedicated to his work, hard-working, so the achievements and reception from the current community are very worthy." With a spirit of progress and hard work, Quan's technology products receive a lot of attention and investment from famous corporations in the world, such as: Microsoft, Google and Stability AI. "When I returned to Vietnam to start a business, many people asked me why I quit my job when I had the opportunity to develop in the US. But I think Vietnam is on the rise in the technology sector and there are many international investment funds pouring in, which will create great conditions for successful startups. Therefore, an income of thousands of dollars can be completely earned back, so I do not regret my decision," Quan expressed. Quan also sent a message: "Vietnamese people are really good at information technology research, especially artificial intelligence. In particular, there are currently many startups developing chatbots or language models. However, young people still encounter problems in communication and information collection, so they need to learn, grasp trends and dare to try new things, then the rewards will be very worthy."

Thanhnien.vn

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