Kunat Pipatanakul

Hi, I'm Kunat

Lead AI Scientist & Senior AI & Software Engineer

Bridging cutting-edge AI research and production—shipping systems that create real-world impact.

Built SOTA Thai multimodal-LLMs 1M+ model downloads, 30M+ API requests. Built and drove Thailand's top research team to ship low-resource, multimodal, and reasoning systems.

Ex-founder and full-stack AI builder—from research to production, frontend, and product. I turn frontier AI research into impactful products.

Research Impact ✨

1M+
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
▪ Engineering & Product
▪ Research & Research Themes
▪ Collaborative Research & Open Source
🛠️ Recent projects
See all projects
📚 Latest publications
See all publications
💼 Work Experience
See all work

  • SCB 10X

    Lead AI Scientist

    Feb2024 - Present

    Overview

    As Lead AI Scientist at SCB 10X, I led Typhoon Team and collaborate with 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 1M 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
    • Typhoon OCR: next-generation bilingual vision-language model for document parsing, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Flash in Thai document understanding
    • Typhoon Translate: lightweight Thai-English translation model for edge devices, outperforming GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, and Gemini 2.5 Flash
    • Typhoon ASR Real-Time: real-time Thai speech-to-text model with streaming capabilities, trained from scratch using Transducer architecture

    Recognition

    Won Techsauce innovation award 2024

  • SCB 10X

    Senior AI & Software Engineer

    Aug2023 - Feb2024

    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, reach out on social media.