Typhoon — Thailand's open-source multimodal AI

TL;DR

Typhoon is Thailand's first open-source multimodal AI initiative, including LLMs, vision, and voice models built for the Thai language. As a founding member, I led program management, GTM, partnerships, and community, scaling from zero to 320k+ model downloads, 23M+ API calls, and 6k+ developers on the platform.

Role
Founding Product/Program Manager
Timeline
May 2023 – Mar 2025
Tech Stack
PyTorch · Hugging Face · vLLM
Skills
Technical Program Management, GTM, Partnerships, Community
Typhoon at Techsauce Global Summit 2024
Typhoon was at a few major AI conferences and events: ACL 2024 in Bangkok, Techsauce Global Summit, Super AI Singapore, and hosting hackathons!

The Problem

Thai is one of the world's most underrepresented languages in AI. Most large language models are built for English first, and when they do support Thai, they often miss context, culture, and how people actually communicate.

Ask ChatGPT in Thai how to cook grilled chicken (ไก่ย่าง) and it'll give you a fluent Thai recipe that tells you to put the chicken in the oven. In Thailand, ไก่ย่าง means chicken skewers over charcoal. Most Thai kitchens don't even have ovens.

The language was right but the context was wrong, so we built Typhoon models to narrow this gap.

The Solution

Building open-source multimodal AI models for Thai language and culture, so anyone can start using them for Thai-specific use cases.

User picks the right model

Typhoon is a family of models across every modality: text, speech, vision, and translation. Users browse the collection, pick the model that fits, and can deploy it locally.

Typhoon model collection on Hugging Face

User tries the model directly in the browser

Before committing to anything, anyone can test any Typhoon model at playground.opentyphoon.ai. No extra setup needed.

Typhoon playground in the browser

User builds production-grade applications with API

Full API access with documentation and demo apps. Same models as the playground, ready for production.

Typhoon API docs and code snippet

Research & Partnership

Typhoon: Thai Large Language Models

Dec 2023

Co-authored technical report on the development of Thailand's first open-source Thai LLM, covering data preparation, pretraining, instruction-tuning, and evaluation. Typhoon achieved performance on par with GPT-3.5 in Thai while being 2.62× more efficient at tokenizing Thai text.

Kunat Pipatanakul, Phatrasek Jirabovonvisut, Potsawee Manakul, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Ruangsak Patomwong, Pathomporn Chokchainant, Kasima Tharnpipitchai

arxiv.org/abs/2312.13951 (70+ citations) →
Stanford HAI

Worked with Professor Percy Liang's lab at Stanford HAI to add Thai to the HELM leaderboard, benchmarking Typhoon against 42 multilingual models.

crfm.stanford.edu →
SEACrowd

Joined AI Singapore's SEACrowd collaboration to pool Southeast Asian language data, placing Typhoon inside a broader regional research network.

seacrowd.org →
VISTEC

Ongoing research partnership with one of Thailand's leading science and technology institutes, spanning multiple projects across Thai NLP.

vistec.ac.th →

Other partners and collaborators: SambaNova, TogetherAI, Mahidol University, Thammasat University, KMITL, InnovestX.

Community Events

Typhoon at Techsauce Global Summit 2024
Techsauce Global Summit 2024, Southeast Asia's largest tech conference
Typhoon hackathon
Typhoon hackathon
Typhoon hackathon
Typhoon Hackathon, hosted with 30 teams building applications using Typhoon
The Rise of Intelligence — featured segment
The Rise of Intelligence, featured segment presenting real-world AI use cases in financial services customer support.

Impact

320k+
Hugging Face model downloads
23M+
API calls
6k+
developers on the platform
2k+
Discord community members
30
teams at Typhoon Hackathon
4 → 12
team scaled