年會開場

1. What was said

Host Kiki welcomed everyone and explained this was a two-day conference: the developer conference the day before, the main forum today. He thanked co-hosting partner The News Lens media group and supporting organisation the NTUT Department of Industrial Design (the formal standing of both is written several different ways, and one item is marked unverified — collected in the next section), and read out the sponsors one by one (the full list is in the next section), encouraging everyone to make use of Office Hour and the stands downstairs to engage with them.

Checked afterwards, the event's scale runs to a few more figures: the main conference standard ticket was NT$6,000 and the previous day's developer conference standard ticket NT$3,000; the organisers expected over a thousand attendees beforehand, and press coverage afterwards reported close to a thousand on site plus over two thousand replay purchases (these figures were not mentioned on stage and are supplementary, checked afterwards).

After the host, curator 李慕約 came up. He opened by joking that his role is only to warm the room up, because the speakers to follow are the main event. He first had everyone play a little game linked from the collaborative notes: look at a photo and guess the year it was taken, saying the game was connected to the day's programme — which is foreshadowing for his own "visual reasoning" demonstration.

He then announced something new: the replay tickets, originally limited to a hundred giveaways, had been increased on the spot to two hundred and fifty. The rule was to complete a social task — post with the hashtag "GAI2025", write your own takeaways and include a link — and you would get a replay ticket, which also covered the previous day's developer conference content.

He also explained that a session had been added to the day's programme at short notice, so the lunch break had been cut from a planned eighty minutes to sixty; the addition was 紀懷新, later placed first after lunch.

Finally he spent a little time thanking the people behind the scenes: the conference's main visual was designed by "江汪" (checked afterwards, it is the second piece in a zodiac series, and the ticket page also sold merchandise of the artwork), the opening music was generated with AI by "盈盈", and there were the invisible but indispensable network and power systems keeping the whole day running. He quoted Kevin Kelly to the effect that "the truly great inventions are invisible", using it to highlight those contributions behind the scenes (checking the source of that line afterwards, all that turns up is the internet's general attribution to Kevin Kelly, with no definite original to check against — marked as no public record).

2. The map of the day

李慕約 organised the day's programme into three blocks so everyone could follow the rhythm:

• Morning: Wisely Chen on real enterprise deployments of AI agents, followed by his own session on AI agents you can pick up today; 高見龍's session (n8n workflows), which had not originally been on the programme, was described by him as a topic that "absolutely had to be covered this year" and was added at short notice; then a run of sessions leaning toward "using AI without writing code", including Vivi Chen, Peggy Lo and 海馬.
• Afternoon: new AI trends first, from the late addition 紀懷新 and from 林彥廷; then the conference's centrepiece, the enterprise cases, where he named E.SUN Bank, Simpleinfo (張志祺) and STR Network (鄭晴元) from the stage; and finally the closing block on the AI imagery applications that have been so hot in recent years, from 李怡志, 陳志信 and Davis Chang — with a reminder to be alert to the risks such technology can bring.

He also mentioned this was a new experiment following last year's survey feedback: replacing the Q&A slot everyone both loves and dreads with an Office Hour, so people could talk to speakers freely. The on-stage version was three to four in the afternoon, one hour, with twenty-two speakers across the two days plus six special guests, spread across the venue's floors (these counts and this time slot are the speaker's own account, no external source). The official announcement, checked afterwards, says twenty speakers and forty-five minutes and gives no time slot; the two do not match. The likely explanation is that the official announcement was published before the event and the on-stage version reflects an arrangement updated after 紀懷新 was added, but that is inference only, and both sets of figures are listed side by side. Each floor focused on a different theme, so you went to the matching floor to catch whoever you wanted. He also shared a small trick: if you do not know a speaker but want to, take photos during their talk and tag them on social media, and they will usually remember you afterwards.

That evening there was also an AI comedy show, separate from the conference ticket, whose official name is 《炎不由衷 Feat. Generative AI 年會》, produced by STR Network (the ticket page registers 炎上股份有限公司 as the producer; the relationship between the two could not be verified further, so both are listed). The performers were comedians 藍恩, 壯壯 and 學仁, exploring the audience's relationship with AI in a roast format, running about sixty minutes with no interval. 李慕約 said he had planned the show together with a partner, stressed that photography was forbidden, and reminded everyone it was still on sale that morning for anyone interested.

3. Co-hosts and sponsors

The host thanked the following organisations in order during the opening; their registered names, each checked afterwards:

• Co-host: The News Lens media group (TNL Mediagene). This standing is written three different ways across sources — co-host, supporting organisation and joint organiser — and the parallel accounts are collected in the agenda
• Supporting organisation: the Department of Industrial Design, National Taipei University of Technology (only the 2026 relationship is findable; nothing public covers 2025, so it is marked unverified)
• Sponsors:
  • APMIC 亞太智能機器股份有限公司 (the company registration is findable, with 吳柏翰 as representative, matching the second developer conference speaker 吳柏翰)
  • 玉山商業銀行股份有限公司 (E.SUN Commercial Bank)
  • 91APP (the Taiwan branch is registered as 英屬開曼群島商九一應用軟體股份有限公司台灣分公司, company record)
  • PicCollage (the Taiwan branch is registered as 美商凱德諾藍股份有限公司台灣分公司, company record)
  • 中國信託商業銀行股份有限公司 (CTBC Bank)
  • Appier 沛星互動科技股份有限公司. The sponsors named in the official press release are NVIDIA and Appier, source here
  • Two further sponsors provided the on-site coffee and the interactive installation respectively; no matching companies could be found — no public record
• Technology partners: no public record
• Media partners: The News Lens, INSIDE, Business Yee, Cool3c, and Meet Startup (a brand under *Business Next*; whether this one was a media partner for this event has no public record)

One more note: the official tiered sponsor list page for 2025 has been taken down, so everything above whose registered full name could be verified carries a source, and where it could not, that is stated plainly.

Sponsor stands were on the third floor, and the host encouraged everyone to use the breaks to go and talk to them.

4. Wider observations

The most striking thing about the opening is how frankly the organisers handled the last-minute changes: the shortened lunch break and the extra 紀懷新 session were both explained on the spot with reasons, rather than glossed over. That transparency helped everyone adjust their expectations in advance. The Office Hour design is the arrangement most worth noting this year — turning the Q&A slot everyone most fears and most wants into free conversation spread across the floors moves "asking a question" off the stage and into ordinary interaction, which is much more likely to produce honest answers than a formal on-stage Q&A. Trading replay tickets for social tasks is a clever win-win too: the organisers get reach, and the audience gets another chance to go through the content. The open question is those sponsors who sound like local brands but have no findable public record — startups, or quiet hidden champions? That is still worth digging into. Checking things afterwards also turns up that even basic facts like "who organised it" and "how many speakers were at Office Hour" exist in several not-quite-consistent versions across the official ticket page, the official announcement, press coverage and what was said on stage. That echoes, rather neatly, what this whole conference was about — how you verify information in the age of AI. If the basic facts of the event itself need cross-checking, how much more so for AI-generated content.

5. Sources