Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer Hon Hai, known internationally as Foxconn, has built its first large language model (LLM) in traditional Chinese.
The business announced on Monday that the AI powered technology, code-named FoxBrain, shows powerful comprehension and reasoning capabilities, with a focus on mathematical and logical reasoning tests.
Founded in 1974, Foxconn is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, with factories and research centres in China, India, Japan, Vietnam and the US, among other countries.
The company’s new AI model was originally designed for internal applications within the Hon Hai Group and covers functions such as data analysis, decision support, document collaboration, mathematics, reasoning and problem solving, and code generation.
However, the firm said that the model will be open source and shared publicly in the future.:
“The group will continue to collaborate with technology partners to expand FoxBrain’s applications, share its open-source information, and promote AI in manufacturing, supply chain management, and intelligent decision-making,” added the business.
FoxBrain was developed in just four weeks using chips from US company Nvidia.
During the training of FoxBrain, based on the Meta Llama 3.1 architecture, which has 70 billion parameters, Foxconn used 120 Nvidia H100 graphical processing units placed in an Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand network.
Dr. Yung-Hui Li, director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre of the Hon Hai Research Institute, who oversaw the development, explained that the model was built through carefully designed training methods and resource optimisation.
He added: “Our FoxBrain model adopted a very efficient training strategy, focusing on optimising the training process rather than blindly accumulating computing power.”
Although the model still presents “a slight difference” with the DeepSeek distillation model, the performance of FoxBrain is already close to the world’s leading standards, the firm said.
“Compared to inference models recently launched on the market, this more efficient and economical method marks a new milestone for the development of AI in Taiwan,” said the technology company. “This large language model research demonstrates that Taiwan’s technology talent can compete with international counterparts in the AI model field.”
“This large language model research demonstrates that Taiwan’s technology talent can compete with international counterparts in the AI model field,” added Foxcomm’s statement.
FoxBrain will also become an important engine to drive the upgrade of Foxconn’s three major platforms: Smart Manufacturing, Smart EV, and Smart City, which focus on integrating advanced technologies like AI and machine learning to boost production efficiency and automation and develop smart city solutions.
FoxBrain’s developments will be shown on 20 March during Nvidia’s online 2025 Session Talk “From Open Source to Frontier AI: Build, Customise, and Extend Foundation Models.”
Founded in 1974, Foxconn is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, with factories and research centers in China, India, Japan, Vietnam and the US, among other countries.
