Lawyers, doctors among professionals earmarked to drive Singapore's AI adoption beyond initial 15,000 practitioners
Speaking at a fireside chat at Fortune's Brainstorm AI Singapore conference on Tuesday (Jul 22), Mrs Teo said the country hopes to grow a pool of professionals to "complement" traditional AI practitioners such as data scientists and machine learning engineers.
The government had previously announced plans to more than triple the number of AI practitioners in Singapore to 15,000 over the next few years, as part of the country's updated national AI strategy.
This new pool of professionals is expected to far exceed that figure, according to Mrs Teo.
"We're 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."
Others in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services will also be part of this group.
"They themselves also acquire this facility with using AI, and then they demonstrate how it can create more value for their organisations," added the minister.
Singapore will have to "get to a much larger number" of competent AI users than previously mentioned, said Mrs Teo.
While she did not provide further details, she hinted that further announcements could follow: "So watch this space, we will have more to say about this."
VIEWS ON DEEPSEEK
When asked about Singapore's approach to evaluating AI platforms amid American concerns over the Chinese AI model DeepSeek, Mrs Teo said it is up to every organisation to decide how to evaluate AI models and whether to use them.
"The thing that we ask ourselves is, what are the impediments of using any sort of technology for innovative purposes? And inevitably, cost becomes an issue," she said.
"From the perspective of bringing down costs, innovations such as DeepSeek are very much welcomed, but I would also say that this whole dynamic is not necessarily only a competitive one. It is also mutually reinforcing."
Mrs Teo cited Singapore's SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network), a large language model that can generate content based on Southeast Asian languages and cultural nuances, as an example.
"Many companies are thinking about how they can develop, for example, chat assistance that could be useful in our context," said Mrs Teo. "So, I think there is room for both."
She added that having an innovative ecosystem can help bring down costs and enable different AI models to complement one another. "I think they just open up the space for innovation to a larger extent."
"I would imagine that there will still be concerns about DeepSeek and other models that would cause companies to take a pause and say that maybe this is something that we are still not very comfortable with. I wouldn't be surprised at all," said Mrs Teo.
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