Building World-Class Thai Language Models with Purpose-Built AI Infrastructure

About SCB 10X

When SCB 10X's Typhoon models achieved a best-in-class 83.0 score on Thai IFEval benchmarks while delivering 50% cost savings, they proved that specialized AI infrastructure can enable breakthrough results for Thailand's 70 million speakers.

SCB 10X, the innovation and venture capital arm of SCBX Group, is pioneering frontier Thai language AI development through their breakthrough Typhoon model family. The team has developed state-of-the-art language models including Typhoon 2 and Typhoon 2.1, which compete directly with global commercial offerings like GPT-4 while maintaining deep cultural and linguistic understanding of Thai contexts.

Their models span multiple sizes from 1B to 70B parameters, serving applications across consumer finance, legal services, healthcare, and education sectors where cultural nuance creates significant competitive advantages over general-purpose alternatives.

The Challenge

Building state-of-the-art language models for a low-resource language like Thai required specialized infrastructure that traditional cloud providers couldn't efficiently deliver. SCB 10X faced four critical challenges that threatened their ambitious model development program.

Training Performance

Training large language models demands sustained access to high-performance GPU clusters with optimized interconnects. Standard cloud platforms lacked deep learning-specific optimizations, leading to slower training cycles and higher operational costs.

Concurrent Experimentation

Optimizing models for Thai language required running multiple experiments simultaneously. Traditional providers made this expensive and complex, creating bottlenecks that slowed iteration on model architectures and training strategies.

Inference Complexity

Serving large language models efficiently requires sophisticated batching, scheduling, and GPU optimization. Building this infrastructure in-house would have diverted crucial engineering resources away from core model development.

Cost Pressures

As a research-focused team, cost efficiency was critical for program sustainability. Standard cloud GPU pricing and inefficient resource utilization threatened economic viability.

The Solution

SCB 10X partnered with Together AI to leverage purpose-built AI infrastructure, creating direct solution mapping that addressed each challenge:

Training Performance → GPU Cloud with Together Kernel Collection: Dedicated NVIDIA GPU hardware with low-level kernel optimizations that accelerated training beyond standard cloud services.

Concurrent Experimentation → Reserved Clusters with Predictable Scaling: Reliable capacity allocation enabling multiple simultaneous experiments without spot market uncertainty.

Inference Complexity → Serverless Inference Platform: Production-grade endpoints optimized for AI workloads, eliminating months of DevOps infrastructure work.

Cost Pressures → AI-Optimized Resource Utilization: Specialized infrastructure designed for AI workloads, delivering superior price-performance ratios.

Results

By partnering with Together AI, SCB 10X achieved breakthrough results that validated their investment in specialized AI infrastructure:

Technical Performance Excellence

According to SCB 10X, their Typhoon models demonstrate exceptional performance on Thai language tasks while maintaining competitive results on international benchmarks.

Typhoon 2.1 12B Achievements

The team reports that their model leads in Thai instruction-following with its industry-leading 83.0 score on Thai IFEval (which measures instruction-following ability), while also achieving 88.7 on English IFEval and perfect performance on Code-Switching tasks (evaluating mixed Thai-English input handling). The model excels in MT-Bench English with a score of 9.3, demonstrating conversational capabilities that rival much larger commercial models.

Typhoon 2 70B Competitive Performance

SCB 10X's larger model delivers the highest overall performance on ThaiExam and closely competes with Qwen2.5 72B on international math benchmarks. Its superior results on Thai instruction-following tasks, combined with competitive English performance, make it a compelling alternative to proprietary models like GPT-4o for multilingual use cases.

These results span comprehensive evaluation frameworks including IFEval (Instruction Following Evaluation), MT-Bench (multi-turn conversational quality), and specialized Thai assessments.

Infrastructure Advantages

The partnership with Together AI transformed SCB 10X's development capabilities through specialized infrastructure designed specifically for AI workloads.

GPU Cloud with Reserved Clusters

Together AI provided SCB 10X with customizable bare metal clusters featuring dedicated NVIDIA GPU hardware. The Together Kernel Collection delivered low-level optimizations that supercharged training speeds, enabling the team to run multiple experiments concurrently and efficiently.

Serverless Inference Platform

Rather than building inference infrastructure from scratch, SCB 10X deployed Typhoon API Pro through Together AI's production-grade serverless endpoints. The platform's optimization for AI inference ensured low latency and high throughput, while built-in security features provided confidence for serving sensitive use cases.

Operational Impact

The team reports that the infrastructure partnership enabled faster experimental cycles, leading to improved team productivity and accelerated product release cycles.

Business Impact

The partnership delivered measurable business outcomes that extend beyond technical metrics, demonstrating real-world economic impact across Thailand's key industries.

Economic Sustainability

According to SCB 10X, the 50% cost reduction compared to traditional cloud providers made ambitious model development economically sustainable while achieving world-class performance.

Real-World Applications

The team reports that Typhoon models are now deployed across high-value applications including legal assistance, labor market analysis, exam preparation, knowledge management, and customer service support.

Future Roadmap

SCB 10X indicates their research shows strong demand for foundational technologies including ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), TTS (Text-to-Speech), and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) specifically optimized for Thai contexts. According to the team, their roadmap targets Consumer Finance, Legal, Healthcare, and Education sectors.

"Together AI allowed us to move at the pace of bleeding-edge AI research and development, without sacrificing performance or reliability. They gave us the tools and support to build frontier Thai AI – enabling us to stay focused on what matters most." — SCB 10X Typhoon Team

Why This Matters

The SCB 10X case study demonstrates how purpose-built AI infrastructure can accelerate breakthrough research while maintaining operational simplicity that ambitious teams require. As more organizations worldwide recognize the value of culturally-aware AI, Together AI's specialized infrastructure enables regional teams to compete with global offerings while serving local needs with unprecedented precision.

This partnership shows that with the right infrastructure foundation, regional teams can achieve world-class AI performance while maintaining complete model ownership and cultural authenticity—a critical advantage in an increasingly AI-driven global economy.