[SINGAPORE] Singapore plans to foster a brave pool of artificial intelligence (AI) users to complement data scientists and machine learning engineers.
“We're talking about people in the profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors – who become early adopters of AI. Then they show their peers how to make better use of it.”
During a fireside chat entitled “Beyond Scale: How Small Countries Lead to an Age of AI,” she detailed how small states can develop AI strategies to compete on a global stage dominated by major powers such as the US and China.
The pool of AI users needs to go well beyond the 15,000 AI practitioners Singapore already aims to nurture and hire, Teo said.
She noted that the country's workforce is around 3.5 million, including those in manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.
“They can show how (AI) create more value for their organization,” Teo said, adding that details about equipping AI skills will be announced in the future.
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The minister answered the question luck Clay Chandler, the magazine's Asian executive editor, said on talent development as part of a larger dialogue about Singapore's distinction between AI strategies on the global stage as a small island nation.
Plans to triple the talent pool of AI practitioners in Singapore to 15,000 people were first announced in December 2023. The group includes scientists and engineers in data and machine learning, the backbone that translates AI into real apps.
Theo also said small countries can find their niche and compete in a rapidly changing market.
In January 2025, China's DeepSeek launched a generation AI model that cost $5.6 million ($7.2 million) to train startups.
Since then, Chinese technical leaders have contributed to the market with several low-cost AI services.
Theo said: “Innovations like Deepseek are welcome in terms of reducing costs.”
Citing how Singapore found the niche in the language model it developed for its region, she said there is room for innovation in small states.
“I also say that this whole dynamic is not necessarily competitive, but rather reinforces each other,” she said, referring to her country's invention of Sea Lion.
Developed by AI Singapore, Sea-Lion was trained in 13 languages, including Javanese, Sudanese, Malay, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, and in English and Chinese.
“We know that large-scale language models trained primarily in western corpus will be difficult to apply in the Southeast Asian context,” Theo said.
“If we build AI tools on top of these LLMs, if we don't incorporate the kind of data we see in some of us in the world, then of course the performance and response methods to the prompts will probably not meet the requirements of Singapore and our neighboring countries.”
She added: “Many companies use a combination of both when they think about how they can develop, such as chat support that could be useful in our context.”
Sea-Lion has been tapped by several companies for its language capabilities, and Indonesia's GOTO Group is one of the first companies to adopt it as a base for building its own AI systems.
The space for innovation in Singapore will expand when factors such as how to reduce costs and how AI models complement each other are considered, Teo said.
The Republic will also continue to build bilateral infrastructures for all countries and advance in new technological fields, she added.
The Minister said this in response to a question from Chandler about how the country can maintain a strategically unconsolidated stance amid the US-China tensions.
She cited the dialogue with Singapore and the US on critical and emerging technologies, and with China on digital policy.
She added: “They cover a variety of areas of interest that we mutually believe are important to our country, but we cannot continue to find ways to move forward by preventing us from trying to better understand each other's concerns.
“In ASEAN countries, even if they are not prepared to move into an age of AI governance standards, there is nothing that prevents them from agreeing to what ethical principles are first seen.” The Strait Era.
