Singapore is quietly building AI that matters

At ATxSummit 2025, Singapore is focusing on practical and meaningful AI solutions - those that deliver real benefits for citizens and industries alike.

At the Capelle Singapore this morning, a stellar lineup of speakers from Mistral AI, Groq, Databricks, Grab, and Cohere spoke about AI.

Singapore's push for AI

With AI, Singapore had sought to look beyond chasing after GPUs and compute capacity to practical applications.

Minister Josephine Teo: "It's not unusual at the beginning of an innovation cycle, to seek to boost activity from the supply side. Some access to [GPUs] capacity is clearly needed. It is, however, the demand side that needs nurturing..."

Beyond helping businesses with AI one company at a time, there is value in aggregating efforts to strengthen AI capabilities at scale.

𝗔𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆:

• Aggregation by industry: For this reason, Singapore focused on nine key sectors as part of National AI Strategy (NAIS) 2.0 with a commitment of SG$1 over five years.
• National aggregation: At the national level, Singapore invested in initiatives such as the SEA-LION LLM that's trained on Southeast Asia data and language.

Spotlight on MERaLiON

It's worth mentioning that Minister Teo also put the spotlight on a new version of MERaLiON, or Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network.

Developed by A*Star as part of the National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP), MERaLiON can analyse emotional cues during spoken conversations.

• Eight languages, including Singlish.
• Non-verbal cues such as volume, emotion and tone.
• Sentences with a mix of languages (code-switching).

In essence, it's just what a multicultural society like Singapore needs.

Noteworthy quotes

Here are some quotes that caught my attention.

• Mistral AI's Arthur Mensch: "To change the enterprise, you need to identify processes that you can replace with more automation. You need to think not only at the individual level, but at the organisation level."
• Groq's Ian Andrews: "The only advice I'll give you is to go out and [try it]... AI is moving so incredibly fast; things that didn't work 3 weeks ago, work today."
• Grab's Suthen Thomas Paradatheth: "AI works really best when it's paired with wisdom... ultimately, AI is a tool. There's a customer at the end. Why are you using this to create impact for them or for the business?"
• Cohere's Aidan Gomez: "DeepSeek provided a very good lesson to the market, which is, [going] bigger, scaling up, training a model on a larger supercomputer, that era is ending. It's starting to deliver diminishing returns."

How are you or your organisation using AI today?