Kunat Pipatanakul

Hi, I'm Kunat 👋🏻

Lead AI Scientist & Senior AI & Software Engineer

I bridge and advance cutting-edge AI research with production systems to drive real-world impact.

Created SOTA Thai LLMs (100K+ downloads, 30M+ API requests). Led top research team in Thailand and publish in low-resource language models, multimodal and reasoning systems with practical deployment experience at scale.

Founded and led an AI startup, owning the full stack from research to user-focused frontend and product design. Blend of deep research, production engineering, and human understanding to turn complex AI into usable, impactful products.

Research Implementation AI/ML Systems Design Multimodal AI Product Development Human-Centered AI POC & Prototyping

Research Impact ✨

100K+
Model Downloads
30M+
API Requests
9+
Research Publications

Engineering Impact ⚡

10+
Years Experience
10+
Products Shipped
1M+
Max users
2k+
Concurrent users

🧠 Area of Expertise

▪ Research & Research Themes

🌏 Low-Resource Language Models

Pioneering techniques for building efficient and high-performing LLMs for underrepresented languages with limited data.

🌟 Model Adaptation & Merging

Efficiently adapt models to new languages, tasks, and capabilities without full retraining or loss of performance due to catastrophic forgetting.

🇹🇭 Language Model Alignment

Developing aligned AI systems that align with local values and use cases.

🎥 Multimodal AI Systems

Creating integrated AI systems that seamlessly handle text, vision, and audio for comprehensive understanding and generation.

🧠 Reasoning LLMs

Developing specialized models with reasoning capabilities by leveraging test-time scaling for complex problem-solving tasks.

▪ Collaborative Research & Open Source

📖 Open Source Contributions

Typhoon model family release, evaluation benchmarks for Thai LLMs, Southeast Asian language resources, and technical reports

🌐 International Research Partnerships

Southeast Asia LLM development, and multimodal AI research

▪ Engineering Expertise

🏗️ AI Product Development

End-to-end creation of AI-powered products, from research integration to user-centered implementation.

⚙️ Production ML Systems

Building high-performance cost-effective, scalable ML infrastructure that handles production workloads.

📊 Large-Scale Data Processing

Architecting and implementing systems for processing and analyzing massive datasets efficiently.

🔍 POC & Prototyping

Technical readiness evaluation, and prototype for AI products

🛠️ Recent projects
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📚 Latest publications
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💼 Work Experience
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  • Feb2024 - Present
    SCB 10X
    Lead AI Scientist

    Overview

    As Lead AI Scientist at SCB 10X, I collaborate with the Typhoon Team and SCBx R&D to democratize AI systems for low-resource languages and position Thailand as a leading AI innovation hub.

    Key Achievements

    • Founding member of the Typhoon Team, building it from the ground up into Thailand’s top AI research lab
    • Led and launched multiple LLMs optimized for Thai, achieving over 100K downloads on Hugging Face and more than 30M API requests
    • Actively contributed as both an individual contributor and supervisor across the majority of Typhoon Lab’s projects

    Major Projects

    • Typhoon2: text, vision, and audio multi-modality model (one of the first in SEA)
    • Typhoon Audio2: one of the first end-to-end speech LLMs in SEA
    • Typhoon T1: Southeast Asia’s first reasoning model
    • Typhoon R1: the most advanced reasoning LLM tailored for Thai

    Recognition

    Won Techsauce innovation award 2024

  • Aug2023 - Feb2024
    SCB 10X
    Senior AI & Software Engineer

    Overview

    As Senior AI & Software Engineer at SCB 10X, I worked with the Venture Building - Platform Team, crafting strategy and execution toward building the next Thai unicorn startup in the era of AI.

    Key Achievements

    • Main author of Typhoon, the most competitive Thai Large Language Model
    • Designed a Thai knowledge evaluation system from scratch for LLMs
    • Designed and implemented a continuous pretraining pipeline to adapt English-focused LLMs to Thai
    • Published research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13951
    • Contributed to direction/theme and framework for AI project guidelines for the overall Venture Builder team
    • Collaborated across all Venture Builder AI projects and initiatives

    Impact

    The work done during this period laid the foundation for what would become Typhoon Team, later established as Thailand’s premier AI research lab focused on language model development for Thai and regional languages.

🤝 Let's Connect

If you want to get in touch with me about something or just to say hi, reach out on social media or send me an email.