Minister Kacır: We will make Türkiye one of the countries leading the artificial intelligence revolution

The TÜBİTAK Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem Call Contract Signing Ceremony was held with the participation of the Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır. In addition to Minister Kacır, Istanbul Governor Davut Gül, TÜBİTAK President Prof. Dr. Orhan Aydın and many academics and students attended the ceremony.

'WE ARE RAISING OUR YOUTH TO BE INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL DIRECT THE TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE'

Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır said, “We established the Artificial Intelligence Institute within TÜBİTAK to develop pioneering, sustainable solutions and technologies that will respond to the needs of our country and global trends. With initiatives such as the world's largest technology festival TEKNOFEST, Try-Do Technology Workshops and Sector Campus, we are raising our youth as individuals who will shape the technologies of the future. A strong and secure data processing infrastructure is our indispensable strategic priority for sustainable success in the field of artificial intelligence. We commissioned ARF, which is among the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers with a computing capacity equivalent to 40 thousand laptops, last year. We have enabled high-intensity simulations carried out in many strategic areas to be carried out quickly, securely and in a way that the data remains in our country. We aim to triple our processing capacity by strengthening our supercomputer infrastructure with new generation graphics processor units in the near future, thus providing higher support for projects in the field of artificial intelligence. In addition to strengthening our domestic infrastructure; we are ensuring that our private sector, universities and public institutions have access to the world's most advanced computing capabilities.”

'DEVELOPING NATIONAL AND ORIGINAL PROJECTS IN THE FIELD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS ALWAYS OUR PRIORITY'

Minister Kacır said, “As a partner of the European High Performance Computing Consortium (EuroHPC), we have made MareNostrum 5, which has a processing power equivalent to approximately 380 thousand laptops, available to our researchers. It is always our priority to develop more national and original projects in the field of artificial intelligence and to commercialize these projects and transfer them to the use of the private sector. With this understanding, with our TÜBİTAK Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem Calls; we support the projects of companies that need artificial intelligence solutions, SMEs that develop technologies in this field, and research centers. We have opened the first of these calls in 2022, and in the third, we have decided to support 12 projects in five different thematic areas. In the consortiums that will carry out the projects, 12 initiatives, 6 of which are SMEs, are included as customer organizations. Our 12 technology developers, all of whom are SMEs, 11 universities and the Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry will develop the required technology solutions. Our Artificial Intelligence Institute will anonymize the information obtained from the projects to be carried out in this process. "It will be responsible for bringing these projects to the ecosystem. It will also provide technical consultancy and expert support to consortiums by directly participating in the project production stages. I congratulate all stakeholders of the 12 projects that have been awarded support. On this occasion, I invite initiatives that plan to integrate artificial intelligence systems into their business processes to apply to the fourth call we opened on May 15," he said.

'WE WILL PUT OUR COUNTRY'S FIRST BASIC ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BIG LANGUAGE MODEL INTO USE'

Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır said, "In our call that will remain open until August 31; we will ensure that our companies that need artificial intelligence solutions under the titles of smart production systems, smart agriculture, food and livestock, climate change and sustainability, smart education and finance technologies benefit effectively from the accumulation of our country's research and innovation infrastructure. As the Ministry of Industry and Technology; we will continue to support our companies' efforts to produce added value by integrating artificial intelligence-based technologies into their production processes. We will continue to work with all our might to carry our country to the position it deserves in the global arena in the Turkish Century. The 2030 Industry and Technology Strategy Document, which is a roadmap for the next five years, was announced by our President on March 26. In our Strategy Document; we set forth our goal of full independence in industrial production and technology and our vision of carrying Türkiye to a global leadership position in the production and export of high-tech products. In line with our Strategy Document, we will put into use the first basic artificial intelligence large language model of our country, enriched with Turkish data. Within the scope of the project, our TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Artificial Intelligence Institute; compiled trillion tokens of data. It meticulously cleaned the 300 billion token data pool and trained it on different architectures. It produced native language models that can process text with high accuracy. We continue our work to transform these models into multi-modal artificial intelligence systems that can process multiple data types such as images and audio together, without limiting them to text. In the coming period, we will further expand the use of artificial intelligence technologies in production processes with Artificial Intelligence Transformation Programs. We will continue to support initiatives that will enable the emergence of new native and original artificial intelligence models with concrete steps. We will accelerate the establishment of hyperscale data centers in Türkiye. We will continue our work without slowing down to make Türkiye one of the countries leading the artificial intelligence revolution."

'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, LET'S SAY IT IS AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY'

Speaking at the program, Istanbul Governor Davut Gül said, “As you all know, artificial intelligence is an important discovery that makes our lives easier and sometimes more difficult. Not only using it, but also developing artificial intelligence as much as possible, owning it, and dominating that information will be in the hands of our universities. As in every field, TÜBİTAK’s coordination of our universities here and our Ministry of Industry and Technology’s patronage of this work will undoubtedly prepare us for the future. On this occasion, I would like to thank our Minister, our TÜBİTAK President, and each and every one of our rectors. I hope this call will be auspicious.”

Following the speech of the Minister of Industry and Technology, Mehmet Fatih Kacır, a signing ceremony was held. Then, a souvenir photo was taken and the program ended.

DHA

Reporter: News Center