Bangkok, Thailand – Chulalongkorn University, a higher education institution in Thailand, has recently partnered with Google Cloud to jointly introduce its new multilingual, multimodal generative AI application built using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
Named ChulaGENIE, this new application is designed to meet the research and learning needs of Chula’s diverse community. Said initiative will be initially available to Chula staff and faculty members in January 2025, with all students receiving access in March 2025.
By integrating with Model Garden on Vertex AI, ChulaGENIE allows users to discover and select AI foundation models. These models have varying strengths and are suitable for different tasks. Initially, users can use Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash or Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Users of ChulaGENIE can then benefit from Gemini models’ multilingual support to simplify complex topics or create content in languages like Thai and English, ensuring speed and accuracy. With these models’ multimodality and long context window, users can further upload lengthy and complex documents, including PDFs. Gemini models can process the text and visual elements within these documents to help users extract specific information or insights.
Moreover, Chula will soon introduce a new functionality within ChulaGENIE: members of the Chula community will be able to create custom AI agents specialising in a particular area to assist themselves or others with specific tasks. Potential examples of customised AI agents include research assistants, academic advisors, and administrative assistants.
Ensuring responsible AI use, the university further employs Vertex AI’s safety filters alongside its governance framework to prevent ChulaGENIE from generating inappropriate or harmful content. To boost the accuracy of ChulaGENIE’s responses, Chula also plans to incorporate Google Cloud’s Grounding with Google Search feature.
Ultimately, the university ensures secure AI experiences with the assistance of Google Cloud’s enterprise-grade encryption and access controls. This prevents user input and AI responses from being incorporated into foundation model training, ensuring privacy and enabling Chula to analyse usage patterns for app improvements. It then protects against the accidental leakage of proprietary research or intellectual property.
Professor Dr. Wilert Puriwat, president at Chulalongkorn University, remarked, “For Chula to realise its vision of becoming Thailand’s premier AI university, we needed best-in-class capabilities to accelerate the development of trusted and sovereign AI that benefits society. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI provides all the capabilities we are looking for within a single platform. It offers rigorous safety, privacy, and security safeguards; flexibility of choice through Model Garden; and the ability to customise powerful foundation models for diverse needs and more accurate responses.”
“This allowed us to build and unveil ChulaGENIE in under three months, making Chula the first university in Thailand to offer a Gen AI application for higher education that is customisable by users, adheres to responsible AI principles, and serves the community at scale. In collaboration with Google Cloud, we plan to continuously enhance ChulaGENIE while enabling more homegrown, education-centric AI innovations to achieve maturity and adoption momentum,” shared Puriwat.
Annop Siritikul, country director, Thailand at Google Cloud, shared, “At Google Cloud, we believe that AI’s usefulness hinges on its precision and responsible implementation. Our Vertex AI platform empowers organisations like Chula to operationalise responsible AI through features like grounding, model evaluation services, and tools for meeting stringent standards around data governance, privacy, and intellectual property protection.”
“Chula’s rapid rollout of ChulaGENIE reinforces the value of a platform-first approach for strategic AI initiatives, enabling development, deployment, and management at scale. This, along with a new Thai large language model for higher education and Google’s AI skilling programs, will unlock new possibilities in research and academia, ultimately benefiting all of Thai society,” he further added.
Chula plans to expand its collaboration with Google Cloud to develop an open-sourced, domain-specific Thai large language model for higher education. This model could be used to drive applications that adapt to individual students’ learning pace and style, providing customised exercises, explanations, and feedback.
