Singapore to increase pool of early adopters in AI to complement data scientists, engineers
'We are talking about people who are in the professions – lawyers, accountants, doctors – who will become the early adopters of AI, and then they show their peers how to make better use of it,' said Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo on Jul 22, the first day of the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore.
She was detailing how small states can develop their AI strategy to compete on a global stage dominated by large nations such as the US and China, during a fireside chat entitled 'Beyond scale: How small nations can lead in the age of AI'.
The pool of AI users will have to far exceed the 15,000 AI practitioners that Singapore already aims to nurture and hire, Teo said.
She noted that the nation's workforce numbers about 3.5 million, including those in manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.
'They can demonstrate how (AI) can create more value for their organisations,' said Teo, adding that more details on equipping the workforce with AI skills will be announced in the future.
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The minister was responding to a question from Fortune magazine's executive editor of Asia, Clay Chandler, about manpower development, as part of a larger dialogue on how Singapore is distinguishing its AI strategy on the global stage as a small island state.
Plans to triple Singapore's talent pool of AI practitioners to 15,000 were first announced in December 2023. The group includes data and machine-learning scientists and engineers who are the backbone in translating AI into real-world apps.
Teo also said small states can find their own niche to compete in a fast-changing market.
In January 2025, China's DeepSeek launched its generative AI model that the start-up claimed cost only US$5.6 million (S$7.2 million) to train, a fraction of the hundreds of millions US tech giants have poured into training their large language models (LLMs).
Since then, Chinese tech leaders have contributed to the market with several low-cost AI services.
Said Teo: 'From the perspective of bringing down costs, innovations such as DeepSeek are very much welcome.'
Citing how Singapore found its niche in a language model it developed for the region, she said there is room for innovation even for small states.
'I would also say this whole dynamic is not necessarily only a competitive one, it is also mutually reinforcing,' she said, referring to home-grown invention Sea-Lion.
Developed by AI Singapore, Sea-Lion was trained on 13 languages including Javanese, Sudanese, Malay, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese, as well as English and Chinese.
'We know that large language models that are trained primarily on a Western corpus... They will have difficulties being applied in the South-east Asian context,' said Teo.
'If you built AI tools on top of these LLMs that didn't incorporate the kind of data that can be found in our part of the world, naturally the quality and the way it performs and responds to prompts will perhaps not meet the requirements of Singapore as well as our neighbouring countries.'
She added: 'Many companies, when they are thinking about how they can develop, for example, chat assistance that could be useful in our context, they would use a combination of both.'
Sea-Lion has been tapped by some businesses for its language features, with Indonesia's GoTo Group among the first enterprises to adopt it as a base to build its own AI system.
Singapore's space to innovate is expanded when factors such as ways to bring down costs and how AI models can complement one another are considered, said Teo.
The Republic will also continue to engage all countries to build bilateral foundations and make headway in new technological fields, she added.
The minister said this in response to a question from Chandler about how the country can maintain a stance that is strategically unaligned amid growing US-China tensions.
She cited Singapore's dialogue with the US on critical and emerging technologies, and a dialogue with China on digital policy.
She added: 'They cover different areas of interest that we mutually believe are important for our own countries, but it doesn't prevent us from seeking to understand each other's concerns better, and continuing to find ways to move forward.
'With Asean countries, even if we are not ready to move into the era of standards in AI governance, there's nothing to prevent us from agreeing on what the ethical principles could look like first.' THE STRAITS TIMES
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