The Singapore government has partnered with Google Cloud to make artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities available to the city-state’s public sector through a new AI cloud platform.
Called the AI Government Cloud Cluster (AGCC), the platform is powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI technology, which includes Nvidia’s A100 GPUs, AI developer tools, explainable AI and data governance toolkits, and a repository of pre-trained generative AI models. I am using stack.
Speaking today at the Google Cloud Summit in Singapore, Chan Cheow Hoe, the government’s Chief Digital Technology Officer, announced that he will be working with Google to develop AGCC as part of efforts to build a foundation for AI in Singapore. He said talks began in February this year.
This includes making first-party, third-party and open-source AI models available to the private sector as well as the public sector through a “model garden,” Chan said.
Ting Liu, Vice President and Principal Software Engineer for AI at Google Cloud, said Model Garden allows developers to discover models and launch their own AI projects.
“We not only provide a cutting-edge Google foundation model, but also introduce a third-party partner model and a very popular open-source model,” said Liu, whose developers use Google’s Generative AI Studio I added that you can also test using the model for low-code and no-code environments.
The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) has leveraged AGCC, specifically the Pathways Language Model (Palm) on Vertex AI, to power an assistive chatbot that civil servants can use to improve their productivity. It is the first organization of the department.
The city-state’s central bank and financial industry regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, will also use AGCC to customize Google’s other underlying models for use cases such as anti-money laundering, regulatory compliance and environmental analytics. is. Social and governance data.
AGCC is scheduled to go live in June 2023 and will be hosted in a dedicated, localized cloud computing environment in Singapore. The Singapore government and Google Cloud also have privacy and security safeguards in place to maintain the confidentiality of government information.
Google Cloud’s move to make its AI services available to Singapore’s public sector has seen the major hyperscaler gain influential customers and join cloud initiatives such as GovTech’s Government Commercial Cloud (GCC). This was followed by efforts to
In 2021, GovTech announced that it is working on GCC 2.0 to enable government agencies to manage and securely use public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
To address the AI talent shortage, Google Cloud is also partnering with GovTech to design and execute government-wide training programs to help government agencies build in-house data science and AI expertise and develop AI innovation strategies. We help you develop and implement data governance best practices.
The training program expands on Google Cloud’s existing public sector skills development efforts, delivered in a variety of customized formats to 150,000 civil servants across 16 ministries and over 50 statutory commissions. increase.
Karan Bajwa, vice president of Asia Pacific at Google Cloud, said the cloud supplier will go beyond the public sector and focus on building AI skills at all levels across Singapore.
“We thought of different personas, not just IT managers, but basically all personas when we were talking about skills issues. How do you see the persona of a developer, a startup, and even higher skill sets?
“We will work with governments to create multiple personas and introduce skills into the ecosystem with one thing in mind: scale and sustainability,” he said.
