Josephine Teo: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. We have to plug the little logo for the cameras. I really like that you are now recognizing the role of the web, digital development, technology. We never really had it officially, it used to be Ministry of Information Communication and the Arts. One thing that we're going to touch on is the growth of Singapore as an engineering hub. OpenAI is opening an office in Singapore and how we can grow more AI engineers in Singapore as well. Because I do think that that is something that people are interested in, whether or not it's for their own careers or to hire out in Singapore. Maybe it's a good time to get into the National AI 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 our audience is not going to be Singaporeans. There are going to be more Singaporeans than normal, but most of 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 AI 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? I mean, there are all these exciting developments, obviously we would like to be part of the action. But it has to be in service of something. And what we were interested in is just trying to 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, it's really interesting. Like most other economies, we do have SMEs. 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 an 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 employees of these organisations, then to see that their employers are implementing AI 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 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 compute 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 organised. 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 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 organise 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. 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, there aren't 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 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. We're talking about people who do data science, we're talking about people who do machine learning, they're engineers, they're absolutely engineers. 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 a sense, we are fortunate that Singapore is compact enough for us to be able to get these kinds of interventions organised. 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 programmes that lead to good employment outcomes, they are very likely to be able to get support to offer these programmes at subsidised 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.…

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