Malaysia welcomes AI partnerships between telcos, media organisations, says Fahmi

BEIJING: Malaysia welcomes the collaboration of telecommunications companies with local media organisations to develop artificial intelligence (AI) applications to help produce content, as well as report efficiently and effectively, says Fahmi Fadzil.

The Communications Minister cited Huawei as an example of a company from China that has sophisticated AI applications usable in various fields, including the media and film industries.

"I found some very interesting applications, whether in terms of digital twinning, language translation applications, large language modelling (LLM) to study weather forecasts, and also some other applications to optimise networks.

"So I have asked the MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission) to look into some of these applications.

"I have also asked Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) and the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (Finas) to examine, especially the aspect of using AI for translation," Fahmi told Bernama in Beijing on Saturday (Sept 28).

He made these remarks after witnessing the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between Huawei, represented by Huawei Malaysia chief executive officer Simon Sun, and U Mobile, represented by chief marketing officer Navin Manian on Saturday (Sept 28).

Through the MoU, both companies will collaborate on developing solutions for Malaysia's vertical markets, including SMEs and logistics, by drawing on Huawei's experience with global enterprise business models.

Earlier, Fahmi spent about 40 minutes observing the AI technology used by Huawei in various fields such as health, telecommunications, digital content production, and housing.

Asked about the risks of using AI, he said a sustainable and comprehensive AI technology regulatory framework is needed to ensure that the goals of using AI technology can be achieved.

"We have to be far-sighted, we cannot be too conservative in understanding the capabilities of technology such as AI, but we need to be careful that the use of AI technology does not cause harm to the people and the country," he said.

Fahmi is currently on a three-day working visit to China since Thursday (Sept 26) and is scheduled to depart for South Korea on Sunday (Sept 29) to participate in GSMA Mobile 360 APAC and deliver a keynote address at the session on "Building the AI-Enabled Digital Backbone". – Bernama