Singapore Aims to Commercialize AI Models, Eyeing Global AI Hub Status by 2024
Summary:
Singapore is working towards developing and commercializing its Southeast Asia-focused artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2024. This move is spearheaded by a government initiative, AI Singapore, which is creating locally relevant AI models. The main example is the SEA-LION large language model which represents Southeast Asian languages and cultures. Collaborations with organizations like Amazon Web Services and Google Research are aiding in this development. There are also plans to expand SEA-LION's capabilities and promote its use across Southeast Asian organizations. This development is part of Singapore's broader technology strategy which includes becoming the global hub for AI technology.
Singapore, an island nation, is aiming to commercialize its Southeast Asia-centric artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2024, asserting its position as a leading global center for AI technology. AI Singapore, a state-led initiative, is spearheading the creation of locally relevant AI models— a primary example is SEA-LION, an open-source large language model akin to ChatGPT, representing Southeast Asian languages and cultures.
This model, the inaugural one in a series of SEA-LION large language models, has been trained on 11 regional languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia, with a completion target set for 2024.
Dr. Leslie Teo, the Senior Director of AI Products at AI Singapore, revealed to Cointelegraph their plans to roll out an improved instruction-tuned model shortly.
Teo disclosed: "A commercially permitted version as well as a non-commercial variant that's unlicensed due to the dataset used in its construction will be released. We're working on expanding our pre-training corpus, aiming to reach the 2-3 trillion mark soon. SEA-LION will subsequently be further refined to 30-50B parameters within this year and extended to a multimodal speech-text model."
This development will lessen the reliance of Southeast Asian countries on Western AI models designed primarily for English.
Singapore, already acclaimed as a major player in the emergent tech sector, and a hub for crypto and blockchain technology, was appraised by a Google Cloud executive on CNBC for its "very high" potential of joining the AI pantheon, credited to its nurturing environment for innovation.
Resonating with this perspective, Teo declared AI Singapore's plans to widen its collaborative circle— "in order to establish a dynamic community that will construct improved datasets, assessment metrics, and models that will help shape and continue to evolve SEA-LION for Southeast Asia."
Teo disclosed their collaborations with Amazon Web Services for infrastructure, and Google Research for data. He also alluded to partnerships with groups like SEACrowd to speed up the development of a diverse data corpus in local languages.
In line with these cooperative efforts, AI Singapore is striving to bolster SEA-LION’s capabilities and encourage its widespread use among companies across the region.Teo predicts: “We're confident that the SEA-LION model will establish new standards in language comprehension and learning, setting the stage for more sophisticated and efficient natural language processing models in the future."
SEA-LION being open-source, it's available for businesses desiring to reach audiences in Southeast Asia.
As per KPMG data, AI fintech funding in Singapore soared to $333.13 million in the latter half of 2023, marking a 77% surge from earlier in the year. This resulted in a total of $481.21 million amassed from 24 deals in Singapore's AI sector in 2023. As 2023 concluded, Singapore unveiled its National AI Strategy 2.0, outlining plans to cultivate 15,000 AI experts, enhance government competency, build a smart nation and augment computing capacity.
Published At
2/13/2024 4:25:32 PM
Disclaimer: Algoine does not endorse any content or product on this page. Readers should conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the asset, company, or any information in this article and assume full responsibility for their decisions. This article should not be considered as investment advice. Our news is prepared with AI support.
Do you suspect this content may be misleading, incomplete, or inappropriate in any way, requiring modification or removal?
We appreciate your report.