Artificial intelligence (AI) agents have emerged as the critical application of generative AI to drive the growth of future tech. Taiwania Capital and Amazon Web Services (AWS) invited globally recognized AI expert Andrew Ng to explore the potential of AI agents and the outlook of the AI industry at the AI Agents Forum on November 5, 2024.
Andrew Ng is the general partner of AI Fund, which has just announced the opening of a branch office in Taipei, with Jill Shih as its general manager.
Deputy Minister Fang-guan Jan of Taiwan's National Development Council (NDC), an investor in the AI Fund, also brought good news to the forum. "Together with the Ministry of Digital Affairs, we are launching a NT$10 billion project focused on AI and digital industries." Jan said, "With the partnership of the government and the private sector, we hope to build an even stronger AI system in Taiwan."
Taiwania Capital CEO David Weng said, "Generative AI is transforming many industries, and with NDC and private sector funds' commitment, combined with Taiwan's semiconductor and server manufacturing prowess with the emerging software, especially the Agentic AI application, we can put Taiwan in the center of so many innovative solutions."
In his keynote speech, Ng discussed the layers of the AI ecosystem, ranging from semiconductors and cloud infrastructure to foundational models and applications. He underscored that the application layer holds the greatest opportunity for Taiwanese companies, particularly in developing robust application solutions. "Taiwan has strong global visibility thanks to its leadership in semiconductors and ICT manufacturing. However, focusing on AI applications can unlock even more revenue and value to support underlying technology layers."
Ng also introduced a new "Agentic Orchestration Layer" in the AI ecosystem, which exists between the application layer and foundational models in which OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta operate their large language models (LLMs). This layer represents companies like LangChain and CrewAI, which facilitate multi-agent cooperation by enabling different AI agents with specialized functions to work together seamlessly.
Ng emphasized that AI would accelerate corporate innovation processes, and some industries will benefit a lot from AI-agent-assisted exploration. He mentioned when AI agents of AlphaGo started to explore the game of Go ten years ago, it started very quickly beating all the human champions. "We're going to use agents to break things fast and learn," said Ng. "If your industries are built on heuristics and not on exhaustive explorations in the past, then chances are that you need to watch encroaching on your territory."
He shared insights on five trends leading to the future of AI:
Trend 1: Increasing demand for AI computing power highlights the importance of faster and cheaper tokens, which Taiwan's semiconductor industry can continue to capitalize on.
Trend 2: Building prototypes of AI-based products and services is becoming very efficient, which is changing the corporate innovation process: "It's easy to generate 20 ideas now, and 19 of them don't work well, so just throw them away," said Wu. Now it's easy to generate 20 ideas, 19 of which don't work well, so just throw them away," said Andrew Ng.
Trend 3: AI is already heavily utilizing text-based technologies. In the future, AI will move towards a multimodal form, moving from text to image analysis, and Taiwanese companies can focus on visual AI applications in areas such as manufacturing, autonomous driving, and security.
Trend 4: Data Gravity is decreasing, meaning the cost of "moving" data is becoming lower.
Trend 5: The importance of data engineering is increasing, especially in the management of unstructured data such as text and images.
CK Tseng, Arm VP, Sales of North America, Da-shan Shiu, Managing director of MediaTek Research, and Robert Wang, Managing Director of AWS Taiwan and Hong Kong, joined Andrew Ng in a panel discussion moderated by David Weng. They see agentic AI systems that autonomously execute tasks as transformative across multiple sectors, especially when embedded in workflows that enhance productivity and accuracy. They highlight several use cases:
1. Service Efficiency: Tseng provided a real-life example where agentic AI can streamline services, like restaurant reservations, by allowing AI-to-AI communication, thus reducing inefficiencies for both consumers and businesses.
2. B2B Opportunities: Panelists noted that agentic AI is particularly impactful in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. AI-driven workflows can tackle complex, high-stakes applications like legal document processing, cross-border trade facilitation, and energy management, where domain-specific knowledge is critical. They observed that B2B applications have less competitive pressure than consumer-facing (B2C) applications, which often get replicated quickly.
3. Trust and Reliability: Regarding trustworthiness, panelists stressed the need for AI agents to earn user trust through the reliable execution of delegated tasks. They discussed tools like guardrails and verification mechanisms to improve accuracy and avoid errors, noting that many companies fine-tune their language models to ensure the reliability of function calls, which is crucial for dependable task execution.
4. Industry-wide Applications: The panelists foresee widespread adoption in industries with extensive digital operations. They mentioned healthcare, finance, and manufacturing as sectors likely to benefit from agentic AI, especially when it can operate autonomously within established, digitally integrated processes.
As AI agents gain traction, the panelists anticipate a wave of new startups focused on developing novel AI agents, accelerating commercialization across various industries.
In his closing remarks, Weng reiterated Taiwania Capital's commitment to supporting Taiwan's startup ecosystem in the Agentic AI era. Jointly planned with AWS, Taiwania has organized a series of activities to support AI startups and enable mature industries to upgrade and transform. Their goal is to help Taiwan secure a competitive advantage in the generative AI landscape, opening new opportunities for innovation and growth.