Singapore: a nation of AI engineers — interview with Minister Josephine Teo

On the Latent Space podcast, Josephine Teo walks through how Singapore's AI strategy came together. The renamed Ministry of Digital Development and Information takes its cue from the role of a developer who conceptualises, plans, executes and corrects, while caring about higher societal purpose. The Smart Nation pillars are digital economy, digital society, digital government and digital security.

On industry, Grab shut for a week to upskill on generative AI, and Singapore Airlines and major banks run dedicated AI teams. Government funds compute, opens up finance and logistics data, and structures talent into AI creators, practitioners and users. AI Verify covers classical AI while Project Moonshot handles red-teaming and benchmarking for generative models.

Teo is explicit that regulation is targeted: an election-content law requires real speech and actions, but for broader development the approach is voluntary principles, testing tools and education. She points to EDB as the entry point for foreign companies and pushes back on the idea that Singapore is hard to do business with.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

[Music] hey everyone welcome to the laden space podcast this is alesio partner and C2 and residents at deciel partners and I'm joined by my co-host swix founder of smalli hey everyone uh this is a very very special episode we have here uh Mr Josephine from Singapore welcome hi Sean and hi alio thank you for having me of course you are the minister for digital development and information and second Minister for home Affairs and we are meeting here at Ray which effectively your agency maybe we want to explain a little bit about what Singapore is doing in AI well we've had an AI strategy at the national level for some years now and about 2 years ago when generative AI became so prominent we thought it was about time for us to refresh our national AI strategy and It's Not Unusual on such occasions for us to consult widely we want to talk to people who are familiar with the field we want to talk to people who are active as practitioners and we also want to talk to people in Singapore who have an interest in seeing the AI ecosystem develop so when we put all these together uh we discovered something else by chance and and it was really a bonus this was the fact that there were already singaporeans that were active in the AI space particularly in the US particularly in the Bay Area and one of the exciting things for us was how could we also consult these singaporeans who clearly still have a passion for Singapore they do care about what happens uh back home and they want to contribute to it so that's how Ray came about and Ray actually preceded the publication of the refresh of our national AI strategy which took place in December last year so the inputs of the participants from Ray helped us us to sharpen what we thought would be important in building up the AI ecosystem and also with the encouragement of participants at race primarily singaporeans who were doing great work in the US uh we decided to raise our Ambitions literally that's why we say AI for the public good recognizing the fact that commercial interest will certainly Drive exciting developments in the industry space but keep in mind there is a need to make sure that AI serves the public good and we say for Singapore and the world so the idea is that experiments that are carried out in Singapore things that are scaled up in Singapore potentially could have contributions elsewhere in the world and so AI for the public hood for Singapore in the world that's how it came about I was listening to some of your previous interviews and even the choice of the name development in the ministry name was very specific you mentioned naming is your us can you explain maybe a bit about what the ministry does which is not simply funding R&D but it's also thinking about how to apply the Technologies in industry and just maybe give people an overview that since there's not really an equivalent in the US yeah so when people talk about our smart Nation efforts it was helpful in articulating a few key pillars we talked about one pillar being a vibrant digital economy we also talk about a St Digital Society because digital Technologies the way in which they are used can sometimes cause divisions in society or entrench polarization they can also have the potential of causing social upheaval so when we talked about stable Digital Society that was what we had in mind how do you preserve cohesion then we said that in this domain government has to be Progressive too you can't expect you know the rest of Singapore to digitalize and yet the government is falling behind so a progressive digital government is another very important pillar and underpinning all of this has to be comprehensive digital security there is of course cyber security but there is also how individuals feel safe in the digital domain whether as users on social media or if they're using devices and they're using services that are delivered digitally so when we talk about these four pillars of a smart Nation people get it and when we then asked ourselves what is the appropriate way to think of the ministry we used to be known as the ministry of communications and information and we had been doing all this digital stuff without actually putting it into our name so when we eventually decided to rename the ministry there were a couple of options uh to choose from we could have gone for digital technology we could have gone for digital advancement we could have gone for digital Innovation but ultimately we decided on digital development because it wasn't the Technologies the advancements or The Innovation that we cared about they are important but we're really more interested in their impact to society impact to communities so how do we shape those developments how do we achieve a digital experience that is trustworthy how do we make sure that everyone not just individuals who are Savvy uh from the get goal in digital engagements how does everyone in society regardless of age regardless of background also feel that they have a sense of progression that embracing technology brings benefits to them and we also believe that um if you don't pay attention to it then you might not consciously apply the use of technology to bring people together and you may passively just allow Society to break apart without being God that's drastic that sounds very drastic that sounds a bit scary and and but we thought that it's important to say that we do have the objective of bringing people together with the help of technology so that's how we landed on the idea of you know digital development and there's one more Dimension that one we draw reference from perhaps the fisical developmental aspects of cities we say that you know if you think of yourself as a developer all developers have to conceptualize all developers have to plan developers have to implement and in the process of implementation you Monitor and things don't go as well as you'd like them to you have to rectify yeah it's off essentially it it is but that's what a any developer any good developer must do but a best inclass developer would also have to think about the higher purpose that you are trying to achieve should also think about who are the partners that you bring into the picture and not try to do everything alone and I think very importantly a best-in-class developer seeks to be a leader in thought and action so we say that if we call ourselves the ministry of digital development how do we also you know whether in thinking of the digital economy thinking of the Digital Society digital security or digital government and embody these values these values of being a bridge builder being an entity that cares about the longer term impact that serves a higher purpose so those were the kinds of things that we brought into the discussions on our own uh renaming and that's it's kind a good experience for the whole team from the outside I actually was surprised I was looking for MCI and I couldn't find it you name it yeah exactly we have to PL the little logo for the for the cameras I really like that you are now recognizing the the role of uh the web digital development technology we never really had it officially it used to be Ministry of information communication and the Arts you know one thing that we're going to touch on is the growth of Singapore is an engineering Hub you know Open the Eyes opening an office in Singapore and how we can grow more AI engineers in Singapore as well because I think I do think that that is uh something that people are interested in whether or not it's for their own careers or to to hire in Singapore maybe it's a good time to get into National a strategy you presented it to the PM now PM I guess I don't know what the process was because we have a new PM most of audience is not going to be singaporeans they going to be more Singapore than normal but most our audience are not singaporeans they've never heard of it but they all come from countries which are all trying to figure out the national AI strategy so how did you go about defining a national a strategy well in some sense we went back to the drawing board and said what do we want to see AI be able to do in Singapore for I mean there are all these exciting developments obviously would like to be part of the action it has to be in service of something and what we were interested in is just try and find a way to continuously uplift our people because ultimately for any national strategy to work it must bring benefits to the local communities and the local communities can be defined very broadly you have citizen communities and citizens would like to be able to do better jobs and they would like to be able to earn higher wages but it's not just citizen communities citizens are themselves sometimes involved in businesses so how about the Enterprise community and in the Enterprise community in the Singapore landscape is really interesting like most other economies we do have SES but we also have multinationals that are at the very Cutting Edge because in order to succeed in Singapore they have to be very competitive so the question is how can they through the use of Technologies and including AI offer a even higher value proposition to their customers to their owners and so we were very interested in seeing Enterprise applications of AI that in a way also relates back to the workforce because for all of the employe E of these organizations then to see that their employers are implementing AI model models and they are identifying AI use cases is tremendously motivating for the broader Workforce to themselves want to acquire AI related skills then not forgetting that uh for the large body of small and medium Enterprises it's always going to be a little bit harder for smaller businesses to access Technologies so what do we put in place to enable these small businesses to take advantage of what AI has to offer so you have to have a holistic strategy that can fire up many different engines so we work across the board to make compute available firstly to the research Community but also taking care to ensure that computer capacity could be available to companies that are in need of them so how do we do that that's one question that we have to go get it organized then another very important aspect is making data available and I think in this regard some of the earlier work that we did was helpful we did from more than a decade ago already have privacy laws in place we we have data protection and these laws have also been updated so as to support businesses with legitimate use cases so the clarity and the certainty is there and then we've also tried to organize data make it more readily available some of it for example could be specific to the finance sector some specific to the logistics sector but then there are also different kinds of data that lies within government possession and we are making it much more readily available to the private sector so that deals with the data part of it I think the third and very important part of it is talent and we're thinking of talent at different levels we're thinking of talent at the uppermost level you know for want of a better term we call them AI creators we know that they are very highly sought after they are all that many in the world and we want to interest them to do work with Singapore sometimes they will be in Singapore but there is a value in them being plugged into the international networks to be plugged into uh globally Leading Edge projects that may or may not be done out of Singapore we think that keeping those linkages are very important these AI creators have to be supported by what we generally refer to as AI practitioners I'm talking about people who do data science you're talking about people who do machine learning they Engineers they're absolutely Engineers yeah but then you also need the broad swath of AI users people who are going to be comfortable using the tools that are made available to them so you may have for example a group within a company that designs AI Bots or finds use cases but if their colleagues aren't comfortable using them then in some sense the picture is not complete so we want to address the talent question at all of these levels in the sense we are fortunate Singapore is compact enough for us to be able to get these kinds of interventions organized we already have a robust training infrastructure we can rely on that people know what funding support is available to them training providers know that if they curate programs that lead to good employment outcomes they are very likely to be able to get support to offer these programs at subsidized rates so in a sense that ecosystem is able to support what we hope to see come out of an AI strategy so those are just some of the pieces that we put in place many pieces 15 15 items so for people for people who are interested they can look it up but I just wanted to get a introduction to people many people don't even know that we have a very active AI strategy and actually it's the second one like there's there's already been like a 5year plan pregenerative AI yes which is very forite today one thing that we also pay attention to is how can AI be developed and deployed in um in a responsible manner in a way that is trustworthy and uh we want to plug ourselves into conversations at the Forefront we have an AI safety Institute and we work together with our colleagues in the US as well as in the UK and anywhere else that has AI safety institutes to try and Advance our understanding of this topic but I think more importantly is um that in the meantime we've got to offer the business Community offer AI developers something practical to work with so we've developed testing tools by no means perfect but that they a start and then we also said that because AI verify was developed for traditional AI classical AI then for generative AI you need something different something that also does red teaming something that also does benchmarking but actually our interest go beyond that Beyond AI governance Frameworks and practical tools we are interested in getting into the research as to how do you proof that an AI system is really safe how do you get into the mathematics of it I'm not an expert in this field but I think it's not difficult for people to understand that until you can get to a proof then some of the other testing is reassuring but to an extent it may be fundamentally unprovable it may well be you might have to be comfortable with that and go ahead anyway yes yeah yeah the simulations especially are really interesting I think n is going to be one of the first University to have these cyber ranges for like a AI red teaming training one of our companies does AI red teaming and their customers are like some of the biggest Foundation model apps and then gotech is like the is like the only government organization working so um yeah Singapore has been at the Forefront of this I mean we sat down with the CPO of grab Philip Kendall on my trip there and they shut down their whole company for a week to just focus on gen training like literally if you worked at grab you had to do something in gen and kind of learn and get comfortable with it uh going back to your point I think the the interest of the government easily transpires into the companies you know it's like this is like a national priority so we should all spend time in it yeah you're right I mean companies like grab what they are trying to do is to make awareness so so broad within their organization and to get to a level of comfort with using gen tools which I think is a smart move because the returns will come later but they will surely come they're not the only ones doing that I'm glad to say some of our leading Banks even Singapore Airlines which may be the airline that you flew into Singapore they've got a serious team looking at AI use cases and I don't know whether you aware of it they they have definitely quite a good number I'm not sure that they have talked about it openly because Airline operations are quite because Alli operations are very complex yeah there are lots of things that you can optimize there are lots of things that you have to comply with there are lots of processes that you must follow and um this kind of context makes it interesting for AI you can put it to good use and government mustn't be lagging too with always believ that in time to come we may well have to put in place guard rails but you are able to put in place guard reals better if you yourself have used the technology so that's the approach that we are taking quite early on we decided to lay out some guidelines on how gen could be used by government officers and then we also went about developing tools that will enable them to practice and also to to try their hand at it I think in today's context we're quite happy with the fact that um there are enough colleagues within government that are competent that know in fact how to generate their own AI Bots create assistance for their colleagues and that's quite an exciting development I will mention that as a obviously a a citizen and someone keen on developing AI in Singapore I do worry that we lead with safety lead with public good I'm not sure that the C government is aware that safety sometimes is a bad word in some AI circles CU their word is associated with censorship or overregulation overregulation nerfing is is the genzi word for this of capabilities in order to be safe and actually that pushes you know what you call AI creators some others might call LM trainers whatever there are trade-offs you cannot have it all you cannot have safe and Cutting Edge sometimes because sometimes Cutting Edge means unsafe I don't know what the right answer is but I I will say that my perception is a lot of the Bay Area of San Francisco is on the let everything be unregulated as possible let's exp explore the frontier and Europe's approach is is like we're going to have government conferences on the on the safety of AI even before creating Frontier Ai and Singapore I think is like in the middle of that there's a risk maybe not I saw you sh ahead it's a really interesting question how do you approach ai's development do you say that there are some ethical principles that should be adhered to do you say that there are certain guidelines that should inform the developers thinking and we don't have a law in place just yet we've only introduced very recently a law that has yet to be passed this is on AI generated content other synthetic materials that could be used during an election but that's very specific to an we want to touch on yeah it's very specific to election for the broader base of AI developers and AI you know model deployers the way in which we have gone about it is to put in place the principles we articulate what good AI governance should look like and then we've decided to take it one step further we have testing tools we have Frameworks and we have also tried to say well if you go about AI development what are some of the safety considerations that you should put in place and then we suggest to AI model developers that they should be transparent what are the things they ought to be transparent about for example your data how is it sourced you should also be transparent about the use cases what do you intend for it to be useful so there are some of these specific guidelines that we provide they are to a large extent voluntary in nature but on the other hand we hope that through this process there is enough education being done so that on the receiving end those who are impacted by those models will learn to ask the right questions and when they ask the right questions of the model developers and the deployers then that generates a virtual cycle where good questions are being brought to the surface and there is a certain sense of responsibility to address those questions I take your point that uh until you are very clear about the outcomes you want to achieve putting in place regulations could be counterproductive and I think we see this in many different sectors well since AI is often talked about as general purpose technology yes of course in the another general purpose technology electricity in its production of course there are regulations around that you know how to keep the workers safe in a power plant for example but many of the regulations uh do not attempt to ciple electricity usage to begin with it says that well if you use electricity in this particular manner or in that particular manner then here are the rules that you have to follow I believe that um that could be true of ai2 it depends on the use cases if you use it for elections then okay we will have a set of rules but if you're not using it for elections then actually in Singapore today go ahead but of course if you do harmful things that's a different story altogether how do you structure a Ministry when the technology moves so quickly even if you think about the the moratorium that Singapore had on data center build out that was lifted recently obviously you know that's a forward-looking thing as you think about what you want to put in place for AI versus what you want to wait out and see like how do you make that decision you know CEOs have to make the same decision it's like should I invest in AI now should I like follow and see where it goes like what's the top process and who you work with the fortunate thing for Singapore I think is that we're are singles here of government in many other countries you may have the federal level and then you have the provincial or state level governments depending on the nomenclature in that particular jurisdiction for us it's a single tier city state city state when you're referring to the government well is the government no one ask okay is it the federal government or is it the local government so that in itself is greatly facilitative already the second thing is that we do have a strong strong strong uh culture of cooperating across different Ministries in the digital domain you absolutely have to because it's not just my Ministry that is interested in seeing applications being developed and percolate throughout our system if you are the Ministry of Transport you'd be very interested how artificial intelligence machine learning can be applied to the rail system to help it to advance from corrective maintenance where you go in and maintain G Equipment after they've broken down to preventive maintenance which is still costly because you can't go around maintaining everything preventatively so how do you prioritize and if you use machine learning to prioritize and move more effectively into predictive maintenance then potentially you can have a more reliable real system without it costing a lot more so Ministry of Transport would have this set of considerations and they have to be willing to support Innovations in their particular sector in healthcare there would be equally a different set of considerations how can machine learning how can AI algorithms be applied to help Physicians not to overtake Physicians I don't think Physicians can be overtaken so easily not at all for the imaginable future but can it help them with diagnosis can it help them with a treatment plans what constitute an optimized treatment plan that would would take into consideration the patient's you know whole uh set of Health uh indicators then how does a physician look at all these inputs and still apply judgment those are the areas that we would be very interested in as mddi but equally I think my colleagues in the Ministry of Health so the way in which we organize ourselves must allow for ownership to also be taken by our colleagues that they want to push it forward we keep ourselves relatively lean at the broad level we may say there's a group of colleagues who look at digital economy another group that looks at Digital Society another group looks at digital government but actually there are many occasions where you have to be cross-disciplinary even digital government the more you digitalize Your Service delivery to Citizens the more you have to think about the security architecture you the more you have to think about whether this delivery mechanism is resilient and you can't do it in isolation you have to then say if the standards that we set for ourselves are totally dislocated with what the industry does how hyperscalers go about architecting their security then the two are not interoperable so a degree of flexibility a way of allowing people to take ownership of the areas that come within their charge and very importantly constantly Building Bridges and also encouraging a culture of not saying that U here's where my job stops in a field that is is as you say developing as quickly as it does you can't rigidly say that um Beyond this not my problem it is your problem until you find somebody else to take care of it the thing you raised about Healthcare is something that a lot of people here are interested in if someone let's say a foreign comp foreign startup or company or someone who is a Singaporean founder wants to do this in the Healthcare System what should they do who do they reach out to it often seems impenetrable but I I feel like we want to say Singapore's open for business but where do they go well the good thing about Singapore is that it's not that difficult eventually to reach the right person yeah but we can also understand that to someone who is less familiar with Singapore you need an entry point and fortunately that entry point has uh been very well served by the economic development board the economic development board has got colleagues who based in I believe more than 40 cities and they serve as a very useful initiative touch point and then they might provide advice as to who do you link up with in Singapore and it doesn't take more than a fewers in a way to get to the right uh I will say I've been dealing with EDB a little bit from my conference and uh they've been extremely responsive and uh it's it's been nice to see because I never get to see this out of government nice to see that as someone that wants to bring a foreign business kind of into Singapore it's a they kind of rolling up the welcome act but we also recognize that in newer areas uh there could be question of oh okay this is something unfamiliar the way in which we go about it is to say that okay even if there is no particular group or entity that Champions a topic we don't have to immediately turn away that opportunity there must be a way for us to connect to the right uh group of people so that that tends to be the approach that we take there's a bit of tension uh the the external perception of Singapore people are very influenced by still the micro incident of like 30 years ago and uh they feel us as conservative and I I feel like within Singapore like we know what the OB markers are quote unquote and then we can we can live within that and it's actually you can have a lot of experimentation within that in fact I think a lot of Singapore success in finance has been due to like liberal sort of a liberal acceptance of what we can do I don't have a point apart from which to say I hope that people who are looking to enter expore Singapore don't have that preconception that we are hard to deal with because it it we're very eager I think is is my perception need to hop on the plane and get to Singapore and then we are happy to show them around Al just Tri to mention that so next year I kind of have been pitching as our the Olympics of Singapore here in a sense that I are one of the big uh machine learning conferences is coming I think your agency had a one of your agencies had a part to do with that and I'm bringing my own conference as well to host alongside this is a conference on AI Engineers yes fantastic you'll be very welcome oh yeah thanks I hope so well you can't deny me should we have reason to no no no um my general hope is that when conferences like I clear happen in Singapore that a lot of AI creators will be coming to sing for the first time and they'll be able to see like the kind of work that's being done and that will be on the research side and I hope that the engineering side grows as well yeah we can talk about the talent uh side if you want well it's quite interesting for me because I was listening to your podcast U explaining the different dimensions of uh what an AI engineer does and um maybe we haven't called them AI Engineers just yet but we are seeing very healthy interest amongst people in companies that taken enthusiastic approach to try and see how AI can be helpful to their business they seem to me to fit the bill they seem to me already whether they recognize it or not to be the kind of AI Engineers that you have in mind meaning that they may not have done a PhD they may not have uh gotten their degrees in computer science they may not have themselves used NLP they may not be steep in this area but they are acquiring the skills very quickly they are pivoting they have the domain knowledge correct it's not it's not even about the pivoting they might just train from the start but the point is that they can take a foundation model that is capable of anything and actually fashion it into a useful product at the end of it yes right which is what we all want everybody down downstairs wants that everybody here wants that they want useful products not just general Cub models and I see the job title there are some people walking around with land yards today which is kind of cool I think you have a lot of terms which are AI creators AI practitioners I want to call out that there was this interesting goal to increase the triple the the number of AI practitioners right which is part of the national AI strategy from 5,000 to 15,000 but people don't walk around with the title AI practitioners absolutely not it's I'm like no you have to focus on job title cuz job titles get get people jobs yeah fair enough it is a short hand for companies to hire and is for is a short hand for people to skill up in whatever they need in order to get that get those jobs and I'm a very practical person I think Al many sing points are and that's kind of my pitch on the AI engineer side well thank you for that suggestion we'll be thinking about how we also help uh singaporeans understand the opportunities to be AI Engineers how they can can they get into it a lot of governments are trying to do this right like train their citizens and offer opportunities I have not been in the Singapore Workforce my Adult Career M so I don't really know what's available apart from skills future I think that there are a lot of people wanting help and they go full courses they get certificates I don't know how we get them over the hump of going into industry and being successful engineers and I feel that we're going to create a whole bunch of certificates that don't mean anything I don't know if you have any thoughts or responses on that this idea that you don't want to over rely on qualifications and credentials is also something that um has been recognized in Singapore for some years now um that even includes your academic qualifications so every now and then you do hear people you know decide that that's not the path that they're going to take and they're going to experiment and they're going to try different ways entrepreneurship could be one of it for the broad Workforce what we have discovered is that uh the signal from the employer is usually the most important as members of the workforce they are very responsive to what employers are telling them so in the organizational context if like in the case of grab lso was talking about you know them shutting down completely for one week so that everyone can pick up generative AI skills that sends a very strong signal so quite a lot of the government funding will go to the company and say that is an initiative you want to undertake we recognize that it does take up some of your company's resources and we are willing to help with it these are what we call company Le training program programs but not everyone works for a company that is Progressive and if the company is not ready to introduce a organization wide training initiative then what does an individual do so we have an alternative to offer what we've done is to work with knowledgeable industry practitioners to identify for specific sectors the the kinds of technology that will disrupt jobs within the next 3 to 5 years we're not choosing to look at a very long Horizon because no one really knows how the future of work will be like in 15 35 years except in very broad terms you can you can say in very broad terms that uh you are going to have shorter learning Cycles you're going to have skills atrophy at a much quicker rate those broad things we can see but specifically the job that I'm doing today the task that I have to perform today how will I do them differently I think in 3 to 5 years you can say and you can also be quite specific if you're in logistics what kinds of Technology will change the way you work robotics will be one of them robotics isn't as likely to change jobs in financial services but Ai and machine learning will so if you identify the time frame and if you identify the specific spefic Technologies then you go to a specific job role and say Here's what you're doing today and here's what you're going to be doing in this new time frame then you have a chance to allow individuals to take ownership of their learning and say then how do I plug it so one of the examples I I like to give is that if you look at the accounting profession a lot of the routine work will be replaceable a lot of the tasks that are currently done by individuals can be done with a good model backing you now then what happens to the individual they have to be able to use the model they have to be able to use the AI tools and then they'll have to Pivot to doing other things for example there will still be a great shortage of people who are able to do forensics and if you want someone to do forensics for example a financial crime has taken place within an organization there was there was a discovery that was FR how did this come about that forensics work still needs an application of human understanding of the problem now one of the jobs that we found is that a person with audit experience is actually quite suitable to do digital forensics because of their experience in audit so then how do we help a person like that pivot good if his employer is interested to invest in his training but we would also like to encourage individuals to refer to what we call jobs transformation maps to plan their own career trajectory that's what exact what we have done I think we have definitely more than a dozen of job such job transformation Maps available and they cut across a variety of sectors just like open source career change programs exactly I think you put it better than I shall yeah you can count on me for marketing so actually one day somebody's going to feed this into a model yeah I was exactly thinking that yeah they have to actually if they just use R it wouldn't be too difficult right because that document to add to a database for the purposes of RG they will still all fit into the window it's going to be possible this is a planning task there is the to of the week to of the town this week because of opening eyes 01 model uh that is this the next froner after RG is planning and reasoning um so the steps need to make sense yes and that hasn't been that is not typically a part of rag rag is more uh recall of facts M and this is much more about planning something that that in sequence makes sense to get to a destination that's right which uh could be really interesting I would love the Auditors to spell out their reasoning traces so that the language model guys can go and train on it yeah the planning part um I was trying to do this a couple of years ago that was when I was still in the manow ministry we were talking to in fact some uh recruitment firms in the US and it's exactly as you described it's a it's a planning process to Pivot from one career to the next is very often not a single step there might be you know a path for you to take there and if you were able to research the whole database of people's career paths then potentially for every person that shows up and asks the question you can use this database to map a new career path oh yeah I'm very open about my own career transition from Finance to to Tech that's why I bought Quincy lson here to raise U because he taught me to code and I think he can teach Singapore to code well why not if they want to many do yeah many do yeah so so they will be complimentary there will be um there is the planning aspect of it but if you wanted to use RG does not have individual personalized career path to draw on that one has got a frame a proposal of how you could go about it it could tell you maybe from a you could get to B whereas what you're talking about planning is that well here's how someone else has gotten from A to B by going through CDE in between so they're complimentary things you and I talked a little bit this morning about winning the 30-year War right like a lot of the plans are very shortterm very like how can we get it now how can how can we like we got open a to to open office here great let's go and get an topic Google Deep Mind all these all these guys to a creators to move to Singapore hopefully we can get there maybe not uh maybe maybe not right it's hard to tell the 30 war in my mind is the kind of skill of operation that we did that leads me to speak English today we as a government decided strategically English is a important thing we'll teach it in schools we adopt it as the the language of business and you and I discussed like is there something for code like is it that level is it time for that kind of shift that we've done for English for Mandarin and like is that's the third one that we speak python as a second language and I I want to just get your reactions to to this crazy idea it may not be so crazy uh the idea that um you need to acquire literacy in a particular field I mean some years ago we decided that computer literacy was important for everyone to have and put in place quite a lot of programs in order to enable people at various uh stages of learning uh including those who are already adult Learners to try and acquire these kinds of skills so you know AI literacy is is not a far-fetched ideaa is it all going to be coding perhaps for some people this type of skills will be very relevant is it necessary for everyone that's something I think the the it's um the jury is out I don't uh think that there is a clear conclusion we've discussed this also with colleagues from around the world who are interested in uh trying to improve the educational outcomes these are professional Educators who are very interested in curriculum they're interested in helping the children become more effective in the future and I think as far as we are able to see there is no real Landing Point yet does everyone need to learn Cod and I think even for some of the participants that raised today they did not necessarily start with a technical background y some of them came into it uh quite late this is not to say that we are you know completely close to the idea I think it is something that we will continue to investigate and the good thing about Singapore is that if and when we come to the conclusion that that's something that has to become either third language for everyone or has to become as widespread as U mathematics or some other skill set digital skills rather reading skills then maybe it's something that we have to think about introducing on a wider scale in July we were in Singapore we hosted The Sovereign AI Summit um we gave a presentation to a lot of the leaders from tamas gsse edvi about some of the we've seen in silon Valley and like how different countries are building out AI Singapore was 15% of nvidia's Revenue in q324 so you're you have a big investment kind of like in Sovereign data infrastructure and the power grid and all the build outs there Malaysia has been a very active space for that too how do you think about the importance of like owning the infrastructure and like understanding where the models are run both from the autonomous War Force perspective as you enable people to use this but also you mentioned the elections if you have model that has been used to generate election related content you want to see where it runs whether or not is running in a safe environment and obviously there's more you know on the more geopolitical side that we will not touch on but why was that so important for Singapore to do so early you know to be make such a big investment and how do you think about you know especially the Saudi naan not block but like you know Coalition you know was at an office in Singapore and you can see Indonesia from a window you can see Malaysia from another window so everything there is pretty interconnected yeah there seems to be a couple of strands in your question there was a strand on digital infrastructure and then I believe there was also a strand in terms of digital governance like how do you make sure that the environment continues to be supportive of innovation activities but also that you manage the potential harms I think there's a key term of sovereign AI as well that's kind of going around I don't know what level what did you have in mind yeah especially as you think about deploying some of these techn Oles and using them you could deploy them in any data center in the world in theory but as they become a bigger part of your government they become a bigger part of like the infrastructure that kind of like the country runs on maybe bringing them closer to you it's more important you're one of the most advanced country in doing that so I'm curious to hear kind of what that planning was the decision was going into it it's like this is something important for us to do today versus kind of waiting later and yeah also we we want to touch on the elections um thing that you also mentioned but that's kind of like a separate separate this is yeah he's squeezing two questions in yeah right alio A couple of years ago we articulated for the government a cloud first strategy which therefore means that we accept that there are benefits of putting some of our workloads on the cloud MH for one thing it means that you don't have to have all the capacity available to you on a dedicated basis all the time the need for flexibility we acknowledge the need to be able to expand more quickly when the workload needs increase but when we say a cloud first strategy it also means that there will be certain things that are perhaps not suitable to put on the cloud and for those you need to have a different set of infrastructure to support so having a hybrid approach where some of the workloads even for government can go to the cloud and then some of the workloads have to remain on Prem I think that is a question of the mix to the extent that you are able to identify the systems that are suitable to go to the cloud then the the need to have the workloads run on your on Prem systems is more circumscribed as a result and potentially you can devote a better resources to safeguarding this smaller bucket rather than to try and spread your resources to protecting the whole because you are also relying on security architecture of cloud service providers so this hybrid approach I think has defined how we think about government workloads in some sense how we will think about AI workloads is not going to be entirely different um this is looking at the question from the government standpoint but more broadly if you think about Singapore as a whole equally not all the AI workloads can be hosted in Singapore yeah the analogy I like to make sometimes is uh is if you think about manufacturing some of the earlier activities that were carried out in Singapore at some point in time became not feasible to continue and then they have to be redistributed elsewhere you're always going to be part of this supply chain there is a Global Supply change there is a regional supply chain and if everyone occupies a point in that supply chain that is optimal for their own circumstances that plays to their advantage then in fact the whole system gains that's also how we will think of it not all the Ai workloads No matter how much we expand our Data Center capacity will be possible to host now the only way we can host all the AI workloads is if we are totally unambitious there's so little AI workload that you can host everything in that has to be the case right I mean if there's more a workload it has to be distributed elsewhere does all of it require the latency the very tight latency margins that you you can tolerate and you absolutely have to have them single or some of it actually can be distributed well we'll have to see but a reasonable guess would be that there is always going to be scope for redistribution and in that sense we look at the whole development in our region in a positive way uh there is just more scope to be able to host these activities for Southeast Asia for Southeast Asia oh could be elsewhere in the world and it's generally a helpful thing to happen keep in mind also that when you look at Data Center capacity in Singapore relative to to our GDP relative to our population it's already one of the most dense in the world in that regard that doesn't mean that we stop expanding the capacity we are still trying to open up Headroom and that means Greener data centers and there are really two main ways of making The Greener centers become a reality one is you use less energy one is you use Greener energy and we are pursuing activities on both runs I think like one of the ideas in The Sovereign team is like the government and also becoming a intelligence provider so if you think about the accounting work that you mentioned some of thei models can do some of that work in the future like do you see the government kind of like being able to offer AI accountants as a service in the Singaporean infrastructure I think that's one of the things that are very new but like as you have most countries have like shrunken population like the ging War Force so there there needs to be a way to close the gap for like productivity growth and I think like governments owning some of this infrastructure for workloads and then we offering it to local Enterprises and small businesses will be one of the drivers of this kind of like Gap closure so yeah I would just curious to get your thoughts but it seems like you're already thinking about how to scale versus what to put outside of the country but we were we were thinking about access for startups we were concerned about access by the research community so we did set aside um I think a reasonable budget in Singapore to make available computer capacity for these two groups in particular what we are seeing is a lot of interest on the part of private providers M some the hypers skillers but they're not confined to hypers skillers there are also data center operators that are offering to provide compute as a service so they would be interested in linking up with entities that have the demand we'll monitor the situation in some sense government ought to complement what is available in the private sector it's not always the case that the government has to step in so we will look at where the needs are yeah you told me that this is a change in the way the government treats works with the private sector recently certainly the idea that um we were talking specifically about training we said that with adult education in particular it's very often the case that um training intermediaries in the private sector are closer to the needs of Industry they're more familiar with what the employers want the government shouldn't not assume that it uh it need to be the Sole Provider so yes our Institutes of Higher Learning meaning our poly Technics our universities they also run programs that are helpful to industry but they're not the only ones so it would have to depend on the situation who is in a better position to fulfill those requirements yeah uh exit we do have to wrap up for your for your other events going on there's a lot of programs that Singapore government and G Tech in particular does to make use of AI within the government to serve citizens and uh for internal use I'll show that in the show notes for readers and listeners sure but I was wondering if you personally have a favorite AI use case that has inspired you or maybe affected your life uh or or kids life in in some way that's a really good question I would say I'm more proud of the fact that my colleagues are so enthusiastic I'm not sure whether you heard of it internally we have something called AI bot yes your staff actually sent me like three times like AI bot aot I was like I was like what is this AI bot I've never of it but apparently it's like the rag system for the Singapore government yeah what happens is that we're encouraging our colleagues to experiment and they have access to internal memos in each Ministry or each agency that are treasure tro of how the agency has thought about a problem so for example if you're the Inland revenue and somebody comes to you with an appeal for a tax case well it has been decided on before many times over but to a newer colleague what is the decision to begin with now they can input through a r system all the stuff that they have done in the past and it can help the newer colleague figure out the answer much faster doesn't mean that there's no longer a pause to want to understand okay why is it done this way to your point earlier that the reasoning part of it also has to come to the fall that's potentially one next step that we can take but at least there are many Bots that are being developed now that are helping lots of agencies it could be the Inland Revenue as I mentioned earlier it could be the agency that looks after our social security that has a certain degree of complexity that if you simply did a search or if you relied on our previous assistant it was an assistant that was not so smart if I could put it that way it it gave a standard answer and it wasn't able really to understand your question and it it it was frustrating when after asking a you say okay then how about B and then how about C it wasn't able to then take you to the next level it just kept spewing out the same answer so I think with the AI Bots that we've created the ability to have a more intelligent answer to the question has has improved a great deal but it's still early days yet but they represent you know the kind of advancements that uh we'd like to see our colleagues make more of yeah Jensen Juan calls this like preservation of institutional knowledge you can actually transfer knowledge much easier and I'm also very positive on the impact of this for an aging population you know we have one of the lowest birth rates in the world and you know making our systems our government systems smarter for them it is the most motivating thing as an engineer that I would work on that that yeah I'm very excited about that is there anything we should ask you like open-ended and leio had another question that we didn't really finish just yeah I think just the elections piece who were super interest s is running for elections uh how worried are you how worried are you about Ai and you know it's a very topical thing for us as well well we have seen it show up elsewhere it's not only in the US there have been several other elections I think in Slovakia for example you know there was um there was an there was material that was content that was put out that eventually turned out to be false and it was very damaging to the person being portrayed in that content so the way we think about it is that political discourse has to be built on a foundation of facts it's very difficult to have honest discourse you can be critical of each other it doesn't mean that I have to agree with your opinions doesn't mean that only what you say or what somebody else's says is acceptable but the discourse has to be based on facts so the troubling point about air generated content or other synthetic material is that it no longer contains facts it's made up so that in itself is prob atic so if a person is depicted in a realistic manner to be saying something that he did not say or to be doing something that he did not do that's very confusing for people who want to participate in the discourse in an election it could also affect people favorably or in a prejudicial manner and neither of it is right so we have to take a decision that when it comes to an election we have to decide on the basis of what actually happened what was actually said uh we may not like what was said but that was what was actually said you can't create something and override it as it were so that was where we were coming from it is in a way a very specific set of requirements that we are putting in place which is that in an election setting we should only be shown saying what we actually said or doing what we actually did and anything else would be an assault on factual accuracy and that should not become a norm in our election and people should be able to trust what was said and what they are seeing so that's where it's coming from thank you so much for your time you've been extremely generous to have a minister as a listener of our little thing but hopefully it's useful to you as well if if you're interested in anything there's no I hope uh your AI engineer conference in Singapore is a great success yeah well let us know can help us okay yeah that's it [Music]