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With China intent on building the foundations of its artificial intelligence in solitude, a sphere separated from the rest of the global constellations, in Asia the city state of Singapore, after logistics and finance, also wants to become central in AI. Competing head-to-head with California is difficult, but the huge investments of the Government of Singapore through the sovereign funds Temasek and GIC (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation) aim to create a competitive infrastructure that makes Singapore the Asian hub par excellence in the generative artificial intelligence.
Test bench
A land of contradictions, Singapore. For the Chinese Bytedance, the platform on which Tik Tok travels has 5,000 Chinese workers, but it is a circle that is not easy to enter. Surprisingly, around two hundred Italians are part of the patrol of the Polytechnic University of Milan who live and work there for Microsoft, shareholder of OpenAI, Amazon, Google.
It doesn’t develop here, programs created elsewhere are applied, but the hunger for talent is very strong, Antropic or Google are looking for hundreds of super-specialists, they come mainly from India, Australia, New Zealand. Singapore offers triple salaries and a no-tax regime. The competition to get the best is fierce, Singapore competes, but it is small. Among the challenges is therefore that of securing the best AI talent from other hubs. Because there is a need to find application solutions and put generative intelligence into production. OCBC bank is providing it to its employees, but will also make it available to customers. In fact, however, compared to the USA and Europe, in the last ten years Asia and the rest of the world have not had the same ability to build an innovative language, South East Asian technology has also reacted differently in the last year since OpenAI appeared on the scene.
Asian approach
Singapore is also a competitive country system that aims for 43% more productivity compared to the paltry 5% achieved over the decade. He has been diving headlong into his interest in artificial intelligence for a year now with the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which generates human responses to user questions, starting in November 2022.
Such a different approach to innovation has very high potential for Singapore as a global AI hub, thanks also to an environment that promotes innovation, but it is necessary to create good public and private partnerships.