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# Singapore is quietly building AI that matters
- URL: https://www.techstories.co/singapore-is-quietly-building-ai-that-matters/
- Published: 2025-05-28T15:09:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-05-31T15:10:22.000Z
- Description: This year's ATxSummit is all about making AI work for everyone.
- Author: Paul Mah
- Tags: Events, AI

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.

![](https://www.techstories.co/content/images/2025/05/1748436886263.jpg)

****Photo Credit**: Paul Mah

### 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?