2025 Taiwan AI Industry Annual Conference: Ethan Tu Outlines Taiwan’s Path to Global Leadership

[January 22, 2024] 

The generative AI wave is driving innovation and business transformation worldwide, establishing itself as a core trend in 2025. Today, Taiwan AI Labs hosted the 2025 Taiwan AI Industry Annual Conference, featuring key industry leaders such as Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs; Liang-Gee Chen, former Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology and Honorary Professor at National Taiwan University; Ray-Jade Chen, Chairman of Taipei Medical University; and Bo-Yen Shen, Chairman of the Chinese Software Industry Association. Discussions covered topics ranging from the progression of generative AI to Artificial General Intelligence and the emerging concept of Regenerative AI. The conference aimed to equip Taiwanese enterprises with strategic insights to excel in the global AI landscape.

Photo Caption： The “Master Dialogue” panel at the 2025 Taiwan AI Industry Annual Conference featured moderator Chao-Hwei Hwang, Chief Content Officer of Taiwan AI Labs, along with panelists Liang-Gee Chen, former Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology and Honorary Professor at National Taiwan University; Ray-Jade Chen, Chairman of Taipei Medical University; Bo-Yen Shen, Chairman of the Chinese Software Industry Association; and Ethan Tu, Founder of Taiwan AI Labs.

2025: The Era of Global AGI Competition – Opportunities and Challenges for Taiwan

The global AI market is forecasted to reach $243.7 billion by 2025, according to Statista. At the conference, experts outlined the evolution of AI development from GenAI to AGI, emphasizing three key trends: domain expertise, issue-awareness, and self-improvement.

Future AI models are expected to move away from being generalized tools, shifting toward specialized GPTs tailored for specific industries. These advanced GPTs will be designed to solve precise problems, adapt to dynamic environments, and continuously optimize performance.

Despite its potential, generative AI faces significant challenges, particularly its high development costs. For instance, Microsoft’s OpenAI reportedly spent $41 million to $78 million on developing ChatGPT-4, while Meta employed over 16,000 H100 GPUs for its latest model training. Such investments highlight the steep financial and technical barriers for AI adoption. Additionally, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which came into effect in August 2024, introduces stricter compliance and transparency requirements, including content labeling obligations. Non-compliance risks severe penalties, such as fines reaching 7% of global revenue.

In this competitive global environment, Taiwan’s challenge—and opportunity—lies in developing sustainable, trustworthy, and responsible AI solutions that align with these international regulatory trends, paving the way for Taiwan to strengthen its global presence.

Photo Caption：Ethan Tu highlighted that providing sustainable AI solutions is Taiwan’s opportunity to leverage its soft power and make a mark on the global stage.

Strategies for Success:  Vision for AI Development in Taiwan

Ethan Tu identified three critical strategies for positioning Taiwan as a global leader in AI innovation:

1. Building Affordable and Energy-Sustainable GPTs The increasing adoption of AI has significantly raised energy consumption, with data centers accounting for up to 12% of national electricity use in the U.S., according to Deloitte. Taiwan’s geopolitical advantages and robust network infrastructure make it an ideal host for AI data centers, but its limited energy resources necessitate careful management.
   To address this, AI models are evolving into task-specific, energy-efficient tools tailored to business needs. Taiwan AI Labs’ FedGPT, for example, is a financial AI assistant designed to serve banks by offering precise, domain-specific expertise. Its professional version, FedGPT Pro, has demonstrated superior performance in financial knowledge tests while maintaining a smaller model size, reducing energy requirements.
   FedGPT employs federated data governance, allowing businesses to train custom AI models internally without the extensive use of external cloud resources. This approach minimizes data migration and energy consumption, offering a sustainable solution for enterprises.
2. Proactively Adapting to Advanced Regulations As AI governance and data privacy regulations tighten globally, compliance with standards such as the EU’s GDPR and AI Act is increasingly crucial. Tu emphasized the importance of adopting “trustworthy technology” and addressing biases and explainability in AI systems.
   Early compliance with these regulations not only mitigates risks but also accelerates access to international markets. Taiwan AI Labs’ federated learning approach allows organizations to develop models in a secure, privacy-preserving manner, ensuring alignment with evolving global standards.
3. Leading with a National-Level Federated GPT Platform Taiwan’s expertise in high-speed computing positions it as a key player in training advanced AI models. Taiwan AI Labs has pioneered a national-level federated data governance platform, launching FedGPT services to enable organizations to optimize AI models while safeguarding data privacy.
   This federated learning approach strengthens data security and enhances model accuracy, particularly for sectors handling sensitive information. By championing this innovative framework, Taiwan can contribute to shaping a more responsible and sustainable AI future.

Taiwan AI Labs 2025 Vision: Advancing FedGPT Capabilities Across Industries

In 2024, Taiwan AI Labs collaborated with key industries to deploy FedGPT across healthcare, finance, education, and multimedia entertainment sectors. By addressing core industry needs, FedGPT has accelerated digital transformation and fostered innovation.

Looking ahead to 2025, FedGPT will evolve into a versatile AI Agent, incorporating advanced capabilities such as vision-language models (VLM) for image, video, and audio analysis, and automatic speech recognition. With features like facial recognition and object detection, FedGPT will further expand its applications to meet diverse enterprise requirements, reinforcing Taiwan’s role as a leader in the global AI landscape.

Photo Caption：Taiwan AI Labs partners with multiple industry collaborators to introduce FedGPT into various sectors, including healthcare, finance, education, and multimedia entertainment.

Key Features of FedGPT

1. AutoKB: Quickly transforms an organization’s internal knowledge into a GPT-powered knowledge base, enabling precise and professional responses.
2. AutoML: Builds task-specific models on top of the foundational model to address unique business requirements.
3. Infodemic: Launching in 2025, this feature analyzes and summarizes real-time global issues, distinguishing between genuine public opinion and online misinformation. Industries such as finance can leverage this capability to produce accurate KYB (Know Your Business) reports, enhancing decision-making and market insights.
4. AutoCopilot: Simulates business scenarios and integrates with internal APIs and knowledge bases to automate complex internal processes. Fully deployed, it accelerates new employee development by learning from internal experts, driving organizational efficiency and performance.

Excellence Center Program: Empowering Sustainable AI Talent in Taiwan

At the 2025 Taiwan AI Industry Annual Conference, Taiwan AI Labs unveiled the “Excellence Center Program,” designed to advance AI applications and talent development in Taiwan’s universities through cutting-edge technology and resource integration.

The program’s inaugural phase brings together six esteemed scholars, including:

• Professor Hung-Yi Lee, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University
• Professor Yun-Nung Chen, Department of Computer Science, National Taiwan University
• Professor Chia-Yu Hsu, Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
• Associate Professor Min-Fan Lee, Institute of Automation and Control
• Professor Rua-Huan Tsaih, Department of Information Management, National Chengchi University
• Professor Chao-Tung Yang, Department of Computer Science, Tunghai University

Program Highlights

1. Driving Academic Applications and Enhancing Research Competitiveness
   By leveraging Taiwan’s proprietary large language model, FedGPT, the program equips universities with cutting-edge tools to improve research efficiency in areas such as literature summarization, data analysis, and data cleaning. This initiative aims to elevate Taiwan’s academic presence and global competitiveness in AI research.
2. Developing AI Research Ethics Guidelines
   In collaboration with academic institutions, the program will establish AI research ethics guidelines to uphold principles of trustworthiness and responsibility. These guidelines will safeguard data privacy and intellectual property, ensuring that AI applications remain ethical and secure.
3. Cultivating World-Class AI Talent
   The program offers secure platforms and technical support to enhance AI skills for students and faculty. Additionally, it aims to attract international talent to Taiwan while encouraging top local talent to return, strengthening Taiwan’s AI ecosystem and boosting its global competitiveness.

About FedGPT

FedGPT (https://yating.tw/zh-hant/fedgpt-landing) is an advanced large-language model developed by Taiwan AI Labs. Built using over 100 billion Traditional Chinese tokens, it emphasizes trustworthy AI principles, leveraging internal knowledge bases and federated learning for validated and reliable outputs.

About Taiwan AI Labs

Taiwan AI Labs (https://ailabs.tw) pioneers trustworthy AI solutions, integrating generative AI across healthcare, federated learning, virtual avatars, and other applications. The lab’s research spans AI music, speech recognition, and media analysis, earning recognition in leading international journals. By uniting talent, resources, and industries, Taiwan AI Labs drives AI innovation from Taiwan to the world.

Media Contact

Ellie Chen

PR, Taiwan AI Labs

Email: wanhsin.chen@ailabs.tw