Beigang Wude Temple is the second-most visited temple in Taiwan in terms of tourist numbers. According to the Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the number of visitors to the Beigang Wude Temple reached 6,699,519 from January to September this year, based on the tourist statistics for recreational spots in Taiwan.
To cope with the overwhelming manpower shortage, Beigang Wude Temple recently spent about 2 million NT dollars to set up three AI workstations. These stations are used for AI-automated responses on Facebook fan pages, scripture interpretation, and divination, sparking discussions and debates online.
According to the official Facebook page of the AI company,Leaderg, a post was shared on the 7th. The Beigang Wude Temple recently placed an order for LEADERG W-38 advanced artificial intelligence GPU workstations equipped with three high-computing-power NVIDIA RTX-A6000-48G cards. These workstations will be used for applications such as automated responses on Facebook fan pages, high-quality content generation, scriptural interpretation, and divination.
About NVIDIA RTX A6000
TheNVIDIA RTX A6000 is the world's most powerful visual computing GPU for desktop workstations. Equipped with NVIDIA Ampere architecture CUDA cores and featuring 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, the RTX A6000 adopts a dual-slot energy-efficient design. It boasts a power efficiency of up to twice that of the Turing GPU. It is suitable for various workstation models from global OEM manufacturers. The NVIDIA RTX-A6000-48G is priced at 180,000 yuan per unit.
The Response From Temple
Following this action by Beigang Wude Temple, it immediately sparked discussions in online communities. Personnel from Wude Temple stated,
"The Beigang Wude Temple, located in Yunjia, faces severe population outflow, making it difficult to recruit high-level manpower. Unfortunately, Temple is also the second busiest temple in terms of tourist and pilgrim traffic nationwide. With a heavy workload, the staff in 'logistics and backend' have been utilising systematic assistance to alleviate the manpower shortage for over a decade."
However, facing mockery from some netizens for using AI, Beigang Wude Temple expressed,
"We cannot understand it with normal logic, but this also proves our existence."