PhoGPT
VinAI's from-scratch Vietnamese language model, open but no longer developed
Overview
PhoGPT is an open Vietnamese language model series from VinAI, pre-trained from scratch on 102 billion Vietnamese tokens. The current models are PhoGPT-4B (3.7 billion parameters, 8,192-token context) and its chat variant PhoGPT-4B-Chat, released under the BSD 3-Clause licence on Hugging Face. The original 7.5B models are now access-gated, and the repository has not changed since November 2024.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 19 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with PhoGPT
- Download PhoGPT-4B and PhoGPT-4B-Chat, Vietnamese models pre-trained from scratch on 102 billion tokens
- Run the chat model locally in about 7 GB of GPU memory, or as GGUF files through llama.cpp and LM Studio
- Serve it with vLLM or Text Generation Inference instead of sending Vietnamese text to a foreign API
- Fine-tune it with the provided llm-foundry configuration and sample instruction dataset
- Reuse the published ViTruthfulQA outputs to check VinAI's 2024 comparison yourself
- Ship it commercially under the permissive BSD 3-Clause licence
ASEAN Perspective
PhoGPT in Southeast Asia
PhoGPT is the Vietnamese model with the clearest practitioner footprint — VinAI Research, Vingroup's lab, pre-trained the 7.5B PhoGPT-7B5 from scratch on Vietnamese rather than adapting an English model, and published it openly with an instruction-tuned variant and lighter 4B versions. It serves as the reference baseline for Vietnamese NLP work. For the local ecosystem, an open baseline to measure against is more useful than a closed, market-leading model. Note the corporate context when planning around it: VinAI's ownership has changed hands, so the lab behind the weights is not the independent research group it was at release.
PhoGPT is a sound, permissively licensed Vietnamese base for teams that want to self-host and fine-tune: built from scratch on Vietnamese text, small enough to run in about 7 GB of GPU memory in float16, and in VinAI's own 2024 test the best of eleven models on Vietnam-specific factual questions.
It is also finished. Nothing has shipped since 2024, VinAI sold its generative-AI unit to Qualcomm in 2025, and the README admits weak reasoning, coding and maths. Pin your library versions, and compare it with newer multilingual models before committing.
What we found
PhoGPT is VinAI's family of Vietnamese language models, pre-trained from scratch on Vietnamese text rather than adapted from an English model. The first release, in late 2023, was PhoGPT-7B5, a 7.5-billion-parameter base model, with an instruction-tuned variant trained on 150,000 Vietnamese prompt-response pairs. In early 2024 VinAI moved to PhoGPT-4B: 3.7 billion parameters, 102 billion Vietnamese tokens, an 8,192-token context and a 20,480-token vocabulary, plus PhoGPT-4B-Chat, fine-tuned on 70,000 instructions and 290,000 conversations. Code and weights carry the BSD 3-Clause licence.
The quality evidence is VinAI's own. The first version of the technical report used a human evaluation on 80 Vietnamese-translated Vicuna questions; the current version, revised in March 2024, replaces it with ViTruthfulQA, 199 questions marked by two annotators. There PhoGPT-4B-Chat answered 41.7% correctly, against 44.7% for GPT-4 and 41.2% for Vistral-7B-Chat, and on the 147 Vietnam-specific questions it scored highest of the eleven models tested, at 43.5%. Those are 2024 comparisons and no outside replication was found. The README is candid that the model is weak at reasoning, coding and mathematics.
The project is static. The repository's last commit was in November 2024. Both 7.5B models are now access-gated on Hugging Face and missing from the README's download table, and the instruct version shows two downloads in its lifetime. The 4B chat model is the one people actually use, at about 186,000 lifetime downloads. An issue opened in April 2025 reports that it failed to load under a newer transformers release until the user downgraded; it is still open.
The owner has changed course as well. In April 2025 Qualcomm bought MovianAI, formerly VinAI's generative-AI division, and VinAI founder Hung Bui, a PhoGPT co-author, joined Qualcomm. VinAI's website now sells in-car sensing products and does not mention language models. Treat PhoGPT as a stable, permissively licensed Vietnamese baseline to fine-tune and self-host, not as a product with a roadmap.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including PhoGPT's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with PhoGPT unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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