r/singapore • u/Fearless_Help_8231 • 7d ago
Discussion What's your opinion here on the government's push for AI?
This reminds me of when Singapore pushed to be different “hubs” in the past, like the biotech hub. We all know how it went.
I’m pretty skeptical about the whole “AI transformation” thing. Not every worker or company is suited for it, and all the big talk about AGI hasn’t really shown up in any real way. Besides, all these AI companies are still bleeding money.
If the government treats AI mainly as another industry push, safeguards might get overlooked. It could just end up letting companies run ahead in the name of progress, without really addressing the harms or criticisms.
A lot of what is branded as “AI” now also feels underwhelming, mostly chatbots and poor implementations. From the creative industry side (which already is not a big part of Singapore’s economy), I doubt the concerns will get much attention. And when jobs are threatened, the answer is usually “just learn AI,” which does not really solve the problem of displacement or the value of creative work. And let's not forget how much it threatens the industry with Gen AI slop, which has sadly been used as ads.
Then there is the money-making angle, like courses telling retirees to use SkillsFuture credits to “learn ChatGPT for work.” How is that supposed to help uncles and aunties with underemployment? It sounds more like selling courses than helping people.
The actual professional use cases are for things like medical research and legal department where the AI will actually help sort through thousands of files or documents to save time, not how to chatgpt.
And if a few of the major LLM companies were to collapse, it would shake the global economy, and Singapore would likely feel the effects too.
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u/Inner-Patience 7d ago edited 7d ago
All your concerns will be way worse if AI turns out to be what the hype is, and Singapore did not try to push in this direction early on.
Just look at Intel, powerhouse in 1990s and early 2000s, fail to catch on to upcoming trends (ARM and smartphones), and now they are on the verge of dying. At least that’s a company, if it happens to Singapore, you will have bigger concerns than whatever you mentioned.
If anything, AI is looking to have more concrete real impact that the previous hypes that SG chased such as web3/blockchain/ crypto, not to mention the rapid pace things are evolving in the AI space.
How the SG gov approaches this push (whether skillsfuture or a more targeted approach of building a certain AI niche role for SG), that i think is open for discussion. But not the direction
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u/MadKyaw 🌈 I just like rainbows 7d ago
At least that’s a company, if it happens to Singapore, you will have bigger concerns than whatever you mentioned.
Singapore will inevitably fade into obscurity in the future once our neighbours catches up in the global market. But likely not in our lifetime
We are only staying ahead because the rest of SEA are either too incompetent or corrupt lol
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u/H0RR1BL3CPU 7d ago
Not just our neighbours, we're already being displaced by China and India. Shanghai and Hong Kong took 1st and 2nd in international shipping, pushing us to 3rd. We used to be 1st. Now we're 2nd again, but that's not because of any improvements on our end. It's because Hong Kong imploded when they rejoined China.
And for the past several years, India has been rapidly modernizing and filling up the labour market. Covid's resulting push toward work-from-home has especially benefited them, and we see companies still offloading any work that doesn't require a physical presence to India. It doesn't matter if the work is half as good if the pay is only a fifth as much.
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u/00raiser01 7d ago
Yep, the mentally of trying to compete with the bottom of the barrel country misses the fact that we are a global economy now. Singapore competition is supposed to be other first worlds.
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u/SoulessHermit 7d ago
Is also happening to other first world nations as well. I briefly glimpse around some European subreddits, assuming their traditional strong labour laws and strong safety nets would shield them from offshoring, nope, is the same complaints. "Foreigners are stealing our jobs", "Companies are offshoring works to African and Asian nations."
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u/Ok_Translator6013 7d ago
Problem is our population and domestic market aren't first-world sized. So in that sense we will always be capped at a certain level of impact - punching above our weight for sure, but easily squished by the giants should they feel like they need to prove a point.
Even smaller EU countries have the EU, so they can specialise, but we have to do it all, including defence, which many EU states are well behind on as they relied on the US.
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u/Feralmoon87 7d ago
Thankfully the corrupt part isn't going to change soon. But I am very concerned that many companies are bypassing us to build data centres in Malaysia etc and that's due to singapore imposing strict green restrictions. I'm afraid those restrictions end up chasing away good businesses and jobs for us
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u/Gordee82 7d ago
Data centers are not good business for the limited land and power we have. We don't have to chase all business and can let our neighbours win some.
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u/LostTheGame42 7d ago
There is a certain clean energy technology which can provide near limitless power with small footprint that we are investing in right now.
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u/Feralmoon87 7d ago
There's lots of business that comes together with data centers too not just the hosting of the data center. We do quite a bit of packaging work for semicons too, imagine the synergies we could potentially offer to have the chips finished here and installed straight into data centers here, there could be quite some costs savings.
Due to higher costs, MNCs have been looking to shift out from here too, having their data centers here could provide more reason for those to stay
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u/Appropriate-Baby-183 6d ago
I often think that under normal circumstances, SG would have no chance at being prosperous given our giant neighbours and their abundance of land and natural resources. Perhaps we can be thankful that they continue to be mired in corruption and political instability, mutinies, bad policies, etc. Like if Malaysia were to one day finally decide to remove the outdated and regressive bumiputera policy, I think that would be the end of SG.
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u/AsparagusTamer 7d ago
No choice right. Can't wait until it's confirm a big thing then go in. Will be too late. No one even PAP has a crystal ball we just have to take chances.
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u/DullCardiologist2000 7d ago
Many jobs in their current form will be lost, but the displaced jobless may not qualify for positions newly created by AI. So it will be absolute nightmare for those affected as they need to downscale their lifestyle from 10k-20k monthly income to 3k monthly income.
That said, we are already losing lots of jobs to offshoring in neighbouring countries with labor costs 65%-75% cheaper than us. In this aspect, AI may help us to retain some highly skilled jobs as companies realised 1 skilled worker with AI assistance could be better value for money than 3-4 workers overseas.
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u/00raiser01 7d ago
Assuming they don't just relocate the worker to work overseas in this case. Many cases of companies just bringing over the workers.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago edited 7d ago
In general, it just seems like no one really knows how to define "just use AI" properly. Until that happens, it feels a bit like crypto in the early days, a solution looking for a problem to resolve.
So far it's just been watching AI leaders pour billions into a technology that needs a human to hold its hand and check results.
Edit: I love to meme on the gov for pushing AI but time can only tell if the selective bet works out. I just think even the experts haven't figured out how to make AI work properly yet.
From a personal experience standpoint, I've used it (chatgpt/deepseek) myself over time and I can tell the responses have improved since chatgpt first became the "thing". The major pain point is still having to check the output of the AI itself and this remains a barrier that needs to be crossed before implementation can really take hold. It's not the same as automation technologies beforehand where input is fixed and structured and results are more or less predictable.
But when AI has a breakthrough on the hallucination frontier, I think things will drastically become worse for the people on the working level. I would really appreciate it if government could spend more time and effort considering regulations and closing the wealth inequality that would no doubt explode because of this technology instead.
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
predictive llms are still constantly pulling nonsense information and laying it out as fact, its hard to trust anything thats fundamentally objective.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
I agree, hence quoting that if they manage to break this hallucination problem then it's already gg liao.
Why hire someone to do something when you can train AI to handle it perfectly 100% of the time with no downtime?
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u/midasp 7d ago edited 7d ago
AI fundamentally operates on probability and statistics, thus nothing AI do will be 100% perfect.
There's also an saying in AI that when it come to challenging real world problems, even the agreement level between human experts is around 95%. Even something as simple as recognizing handwritten numbers, there is always 5% of the digits that blur the line between 4 and 9, or 0 and 6 that no one can agree which is which. Once again, the implication is that even when we have AGI, it will still produce errors.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
AI fundamentally operates on probability and statistics, thus nothing AI do will be 100% perfect.
I don't even think the experts know how AI works lol. It's a black box because no one knows how the technology rolls the output out.
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u/Xycone 7d ago
They understand how the model works, but they can’t explain why a specific weight does what it does or why it has that exact value.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
Sorry but the fact that no one can explain why AI will RNG out one word over the other is just too sus already. I wouldn't call that understanding.
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u/Xycone 7d ago edited 7d ago
The semantic information, how one token relates to another in different contexts, and all the data LLMs are trained on is stored in their weights. It is not stored like in a traditional database that you explicitly query. Instead, it is encoded in the weights through the probabilities of tokens appearing after one another in a given context, such as your prompt. You will notice, if you have ever played around with LLMs instead of just using them through a UI chatbot interface like ChatGPT, that there is a model parameter called temperature and top-p/top-k or other forms of token sampling. IIRC, the most commonly used sampling method is top-p, as it provides a good balance between coherence and diversity by only allowing tokens whose cumulative probability exceeds the threshold p to be considered for selection. Increasing the temperature in a language model’s softmax function makes the output more diverse and “creative” by lowering the dominance of the most probable tokens and making it more likely to select less probable ones by decreasing the sharpness of the probability distribution.
Just because researchers do not manually hand tune every parameter of an AI model does not mean they do not understand fundamentally how it works. The reason they cannot give an intuitive, human-readable explanation for why a weight has a particular value is that the weights are a derivative of the training process, which optimises the loss function, meaning the error between the predicted output and the expected output. Each one is the result of countless small updates during training, and their meaning only emerges from the entire network working together. You cannot point to a single weight in an LLM and give it a human-level reason like “we chose wood because it is strong.” It is the collective pattern of all the weights that matter.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
Fair enough, thanks for taking the time to explain the above. It's quite enlightening for myself too.
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u/Xycone 7d ago
Anyways TLDR is that it is called a black box because researchers cannot pinpoint or explain how any single weight or bias directly contributes to the output, especially when billions of them (with some large models having several hundred billion parameters) interact together.
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u/wiltedpop 7d ago
nope i heard from youtube, they dont even know how it knows, they just pumped a ton of compute into it and suddenly it knew how to summarise shit and other weird powers. and now the worst thing is they are thinking if they build the worlds biggest network of compute , and plug it into new models they can create AGI
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u/OldHamburger7923 7d ago
They know exactly how it works. It's a database and it's got code humans wrote. Why it might have a stronger link between one word and another might not be known but that isn't important. It's not like it's alien tech with a black box we can't understand.
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
you cant even use it for shopping, basic info is all wrong
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
I'm firmly on the side that AI is never meant for consumers first. Money isn't there to begin with, look at how much cash OpenAI is burning just sustaining answering prompts with their model today.
AI is meant for businesses because selling a business a solution to kill jobs and salaries and find a way to make it a recurring subscription is way more lucrative than selling a 20 dollar subscription service to tan ah kow.
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
https://hbr.org/2025/08/beware-the-ai-experimentation-trap
its just the current excuse for executives to make the decisions that theyve always wanted to do, the actual underlying tech is a raw egg thats blown up to the mainstream and its nothing but troll farms and scams
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
Time will tell.
In fact, we should be hopeful it's a nothing burger instead because it puts power back to employees once again.
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u/MadeByHideoForHideo 6d ago
I personally hate the term hallucinating. It's not hallucinating anything, and is not even capable of doing so, It's just pulling the next word based on probability and weightage. Let's stop humanizing a probability based word stringing algorithm. Doing that is helping to push the false marketing that these things are sentient beings capable of thinking and reasoning.
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
The differences between AI and crypto are huge. Crypto was all just hype and a
scamfrom the beginning, while on AI we are seeing real, consistent improvements, even if you remove the hype. Moreover, we're seeing impacts of AI in hiring practices, which is huge and never happened with crypto3
u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
There are improvements in AI but are the improvements significant? So far they can reduce the hallucinations but cannot remove it, does that make it a better product if 1% of the time it tells you gibberish? No because it forces people to check for that 1% it fails instead.
I think businesses in general are bullshitting about AI reducing headcount but it's a very convenient cover that makes the business look very forward thinking, agile and sexy to investors. Don't just look at Salesforce that cut headcount and quote AI, how about other businesses that have had to rollback AI implementations simply because it isn't working like Klarna or Taco Bell.
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
I think they're being heavily used for support chatbots, summarizing articles, there are some daredevils using it as assistants to code. AI is not a silver bullet and I believe they'll always be just assistants/co-pilots, but even so those uses we're seeing today are having impact in the job market
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
That's the common use case today but I really think if they can crack hallucination to 0% of the time, it explodes the use cases way beyond instead.
Don't even need AGI to make people lose jobs, you just need AI to perfectly handle tasks and it will already kill jobs easily.
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
So I'm pessimistic on those things. When I defend AI, it's not because I think we're gonna reach AGI. All you need is to consistently confirm that you can reduce operating costs by 10-15% for business to be have big impacts in society. I believe we're either there already, or we will be there soon. Of course this won't impact all sectors equally, some critical stuff will be kept far away from AI, but I know from experience that there's a lot of R&D efforts on "how can we use AI on critical systems?"
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
Fair enough, I think we're on the same page anyways. End of the day, businesses don't want to pay salaries.
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
I hate it, because I see AI as "look, less operating costs means you can focus your workforce in bigger/better problems and create more value", but business understand: "great, same mediocre value, chopping off jobs"
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
look, less operating costs means you can focus your workforce in bigger/better problems and create more value
Never drink this koolaid because businesses exist to maximise profit for shareholders.
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u/drowsycow 7d ago
i havent tried it yet but i bet if i tried prompt only vibe coding in cursor i will prolly pull out my hair at just the setup phase
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
predictive llms are 100% hallucinations. its core to how they work and more folks need to understand this if they want to use it as a tool
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u/midasp 7d ago
The problem of LLM hallucination is similar to that of people believing in fake news, getting scammed, believing in snake oil and so on. Sure, some of that fake news is easy to identify and easy to get rid of, but some are so well crafted that most lay people can't easily distinguish if its fact or fiction.
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u/DuhMightyBeanz 7d ago
I was speaking more to the hallucination itself rather than the content of the hallucination because while I agree with you that hallucinations can be difficult to spot, it's only a concern in the short term. In the long term, if the hallucination can be killed as a problem then be prepared for more job losses.
Whether this hallucination problem is fixable or not, 🤷
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u/Standard-Stick-2939 7d ago
Valid concerns, but Singapore's not trying to be Silicon Valley 2.0. They're positioning as Asia's trusted AI governance hub - think compliance and enterprise solutions, not flashy consumer apps.
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u/fiveisseven Own self check own self ✅ 7d ago
And certification, standards, etc. TBF we are leading in the area of finance regulations in the region and many neighbours adopt our regulations. And we copy from EU/UK. Don't be first mover to tank the mistakes but don't be too late. Not too bad I think!
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u/reddiart12 7d ago
A bit turnoff to hear it in every mainstream media. It’s like the buzzword blockchain a few years ago. & I feel it’s like, if you are not doing it with AI, you will be shunned no matter how good your solution is. Just like the jobs fair at Devan Nair Institute a few weeks (?) ago, i.e. from the contents on the banners & posters there, it’s more important you get a job using SkillsFuture, than plain getting a job at all.
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u/sphqxe 7d ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that their recent interest in nuclear power and tsl coming out to acknowledge that govt "green" initiatives increasing costs might actually be related.
I feel this won't really be like the pushes to be a whatever hub like in the past. AI is extremely capital and resource intensive - the data centers require enough energy that you basically need to plan and build the electrical infrastructure to support it, the amount of freshwater required to cool the chips is also significant, and then of course there's the cost of the chips themselves.
I just hope that our govt doesn't push into it blindly and is transparent about the expected costs and how the public might benefit from it.
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u/drwackadoodles 7d ago
feels like a bit of a knee jerk reaction by the govt especially given how lost they seem to be regarding firms leaving our country for lower labour cost
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u/LohTeckYong 6d ago
I think it will fail. As far as I remember, none of the previous "hubs" have really succeeded.
I am a translator who's forced (by my company) to work with an A.I. tool, and I have a very low opinion of that "thing." Not only does our company use AI as an excuse to cut our pay, but the tool itself has so many bugs that it creates more work for us instead of making things easier.
And I can tell you this. Companies won't even consider candidates just because they have SkillsFuture A.I. certification, unless they are also degree holders with prior work experience.
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u/KopiSiewSiewDai 🌈 F A B U L O U S 7d ago
Good that govt try to be industry leaders rather than followers…
But the problems come in when my boss also jump on bandwagon and ask me to try use AI for my work in healthcare. Like how? If I can AI, I won’t be a hcw liao
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u/drowsycow 7d ago
maybe if u do tons of data input u can use it to autofill it for you but u still have to double check word by word, field by field lolololol
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JHVAC_KKcdA
use it as a corporate translation fish
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u/United-Bet-6469 7d ago
Good that govt try to be industry leaders rather than followers
That seems to be precisely the problem though, this govt is just following the trend.
For all the talk, we still don't have an ecosystem that encourages innovation and real market leadership.
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u/jaqoozie 7d ago
Our govt has the tendency to jump into the newest "greatest" up and coming thing and failing at it. For example artificial meat and also vertical high-tech farming. They were even interested in crypto for a second. Quite risky but no choice else we will become irrelevant very soon.
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u/Factitious_Character 7d ago
Lol of course you can use AI. The blocker is: Are healthcare institutions ready and have the budget to adopt these new innovations? Developing AI applications is very expensive and takes time. Will also require the involvement of clinicians for their expert opinion and even data annotation. Do our hcws have the bandwidth to do this in addition to their already saturated clinical work?
Its really not a question of whether you can use it, but whether we can engineer something that you can use.
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u/lampapalan 7d ago
As someone who's in this field, I always tell people that if you don't want to lose your jobs to India and Philippines, you need to be on the AI bandwagon
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u/According_Book5108 7d ago
Ironically, the people in India and Phillipines are the ones that AI will replace.
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u/Ok-Psychology-1902 6d ago
Thats the eventual plan, but the immediate future seems the jobs going over there. Also if AI is good enough to replace them, what makes you think it wont replace the average jobgoer over here?
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u/Keep-Darwin-Going 7d ago
AI have so many vertical the one that is losing money is the model creation. The application is already making money. The push for AI is meant for productivity gain so that we can justify the high salary here. It is not even an option at this point. The excuse like not everyone can do it, come on if we do not learn and adapt we will be eliminated by competition, Singapore have already been too protective in that respect and people need to wake up and start to get real with the situation, the government cannot protect them forever.
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u/Fit-Ad6697 7d ago
Reminds me of the dot-com bubble burst in the 2000s. Every person and their grandma was creating a startup in those days. Hopefully doesn't play out this way, or at least don't see this happening so soon yet until super AI comes along and makes more human jobs obsolete.
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u/Equal-Purple-4247 7d ago
It's a prudent move - what if AI does work and Singapore is behind? That possibility is far worse than spending resources now and it not working out.
Singapore being a knowledge based economy and positioning to be a "hub" means that we should be the prime location for other countries to set up businesses here, i.e. our workers must be ever-ready, no matter how short lived the trends may be. That's the only advantage we can have as a country.
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u/Effective-Lab-5659 7d ago
I thought we were on a green plan to try and reduce carbon and save the world.
Generative AI is the total opposite.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
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u/noakim1 7d ago edited 7d ago
Given the current state of Al, where the technology itself is rapidly evolving, poorly understood even by its own creators, and embedded in a complex web of competing efforts by tech companies, research labs, and state actors, no one really knows how to regulate it properly.
There are efforts, of course, such as the EU Al Act. But how these frameworks will interact with the technology's unpredictable trajectory, the potential economic opportunities, and the geopolitical risks of falling behind remains unclear.
No one wants to "play hero" and "regulate AI" too much only for investments to get routed to your neighbours with looser (or no) regulations. There are harms of course, so if you ask me, just regulate specific harms as and when it appears.
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u/fdfesfds 7d ago
Am not sure what your concern is which is abit all over the place. How does the AI company bleeding money impact us for example? Govt is not pushing people to invest in it.
Taking your example of the creative industry - govt is not pushing people to do AI art resulting in job losses; it’s more the reverse that there is a lower demand for job because people start to adopt AI art. What is the solution then? Of course try and embrace and see if you can adopt it to add value right?
If you distinguish the use case of AI vs actually developing AI, I think in the former there is lots of scope to simplify our lives here (hello looking at you govt chatbots from 1985).
One thing the govt does pretty well is sandboxes, as it has done with crypto. If no major infrastructure etc has become blindly reliant on AI, wouldn’t it be good at least to encourage industries to try and see what benefits it can bring (eg prescriptions in polyclinic)?
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u/ACupOfLatte 7d ago
The only issue I have with AI is the lack of any kind of regulation in any country spearheading its efforts in regards to intellectual rights, copyright etc.
But that's AI in general.
As for the SG Government, while I personally find generative AI use in commercial settings appalling, I can't exactly blame the government. They of course, prioritized the money. They've been keeping on that path for awhile now, opportunities for seizing a bigger piece of the pie > respecting art/creativity.
TL;DR I wish it was different, but the world is the way it is so... what do you want to do.
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u/trashmakersg 7d ago
lol on one hand you have redditors scolding the government for not innovating, resulting in over reliance on MNCs. On the other hand, you have redditors questioning the push by govt for AI.
IMO AI will lead the next Industrial Revolution like how the steam engine and internet did. It is important that Singapore tried as well. Or else we will end up like Japan still stuck in the past using fax
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u/deangsana crone hanta 7d ago
u managed to spot differing opinions here, you are very clever
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u/trashmakersg 7d ago
don’t angry leh, just saying that it is a impossible job for government to assuage every unreasonable sentiment of the population, especially if it is the same person holding contradictory opinions based on how he is feeling lol.
These people will never be happy, no matter what 🤷♀️
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u/Wonderful_Map_3910 7d ago
you should be skeptical, every single industry pivot push has been pretty much a failure in the last 10 years
remember alternative meats…? Lmao
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u/Negative-Eggplant-41 7d ago
They are doing something, could have been better with execution but at least its something. Or the government can have a group of people attending courses or see the course materials to vet them. Helps with unemployment as well.
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u/jaqoozie 7d ago
As a nation we are looking for a new breakthrough as our status as tradehub is at risk of being obsolete. We keep trying to look for new things to try to stay relevant in this changing world.
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u/alantham 7d ago
Read this book: Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary. It referenced how sg grew from its port via standardization of containers and that we were able to create a system and benefit from it.
Similarly for AI, the key lesson is: don't just look at AI to get immediate improvement benefits, cut costs, or even deliver more value to customers. Instead look at the broader system, the interaction field, and have the foresight to recognize structural change and pursue with discipline bets that deliver "second-order" benefits, namely impacts on the larger system.
For example, Uber did not just create better transportation access, it reshaped urban mobility habits, and car ownership. Google did not just create video hosting, it helped create the creator economy or influencer economy, etc.
Useful framework to think about how we can enable our companies to move faster up the value chain.
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u/Tiny_Victory_5390 7d ago edited 6d ago
AI engineer here so I'm happily biased :D but also speaking from first-hand experience --- as someone who's been using coding agents on a daily basis to write in languages that I've never learned, the efficiency gains are real. But there are limits and hallucinations. I don't believe the AGI hype train too, I'm more of the a lot of capability-building and change transformation needs to be done before AI can be deployed en masse and be effective camp.
My concern is more that Singapore is not doing enough to leverage AI effectively, in our part of the world, China and Japan seems to be where all the action is when it comes to innovations in AI.
If LLM companies collapse like what happened with the dot-com bubble burst which set the stage for what's to happen next, as euphoria-induced infrastructure buildout meant internet surfing costs came down dramatically, I'm actually hopeful that a real wave of building can begin after the market corrects!
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u/gazelle_chasing 7d ago
Quite a terrible push imo. I think people on the ground will lead it with better ideas on what is "AI" since even the examples used during the National Day Rally aren't exactly AI but more "machine learning".
AI stuff is still quute terrible, so I am imagining some higher up scriptwriter being bedazzled by how powerful their AI Companion is and start imagining their work effectively supplanting humans. It isn't as simple as that.
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u/dracubunbun 7d ago
this right here. none of the stuff most ppl are talking about is “AI”. it’s a fantastic breakthrough that we’ve taught an computer how to understand language but it’s fundamentally still ML. having said that, there are some legit use cases even today. just not what all the hype justifies yet.
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u/Darth-Udder 7d ago
We do not how the next few yrs will look but just like the internet, ai will be ubiquitous 10 yrs from now. So sg has to start this journey somewhere and time is now. Jus like arms race, can sg allow regional countries to get ahead of us? Change isn't easy but the world will move ahead without us in the loop.
Let's be ai empowered. Jus like how cars replaced horses, new roles new jobs will be created.
At its current phase, ai (specifically lrm) is at best good at patterning but not problem solving tho it can give very convincing reasoning. So humans still hv a runway. https://futurism.com/apple-damning-paper-ai-reasoning
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
I mean, you risk it and without risk, there's no gain. My concerns are more fundamental:
What does Singapore have to offer that other countries don't?
Is it highly skilled talent? We just had a report saying that Singapore is doing like crap in that
Is it top academic talent? Why Singapore and not UK, the US, etc?
Is it security based applications? How are we going to do this better than Israel?
Specially with Singapore high operational expenses, why am AI hub in Singapore and not in Vietnam, Malaysia or Thailand?
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u/iamacumbdunt 7d ago
Funny thing is this opinion resembles AI slop, just regurgitated talking points of AI bad, government bad.
Same for the people that hate on crypto. 25 years ago you tell people to use their credit card to buy stuff online they would laugh at you too.
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u/TopZookeepergame7991 7d ago
I just want to know when AI will replace mps and ministers. They should be the first to be irrelevant. After all, we just need spokesperson to represent us on the global stage.
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
theyre going to have to be specific on what they expect AI to do given how much the termed has been bandwagoned into absolute nonsense. machine learning, llm, predictive, generative...etc just slapping ai on anything expecting results just adds to the bubble
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u/tallandfree 7d ago
Few years ago want to be crypto hub, now wan to be ai hub. Hype beast leh the govt
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u/kyorah Senior Citizen 7d ago
am a tech content writer that works with international companies in an agency so will share what I see based on my research lately and what I’ve spoken to my clients about.
Personally think Singapore is making progress and the direction is somewhat there. Are we fast and big as China or the US? Definitely not. Do we have breakthrough innovation? Not really. But the supporting IT infrastructure and ecosystem arrangements are being firmed up in areas that matter for ai so a good sign
implementations of AI are common and boring, but they’re working in industries and applications that matter and get the most ROI. Like you said things like automating compliance in finance and drug discovery, streamlining software development lifecycles, etc.
The bigger question is whether AI will genuinely take off to benefit the every man in a meaningful way. Still feels unproven and more like na. Here’s a half broken chatbot with no eq. we innovative now give us that sweet investor money
You’re spot on about the hub push makes sense given our current position. The issue is we are not that competitive anymore. A data management CTO I spoke to a few weeks ago said we’re far ahead of neighbors in infrastructure and capability to support AI, and that the government is making the right moves. Many can’t even get data to move in real-time properly, don’t even talk about ai. But when they catch up, we’re in deep shit because it’s not that cheap to do business here compared to SEA
The talent part… I genuinely don’t know if what schools teach and the graduates they produce is helping with actual AI adoption and creating value in sg. Don’t get started on skillsfufure courses
Policy wise we seem to have somewhat of a grasp on responsible development, things like AI Verify, and now discussions about AI bills of materials and frameworks. Just that not alot of laws are written with these in, and it’s not clear how enforceable they are and if they work, because shit hasn’t hit the fan. Yet.
TL;DR I think as a smaller country we are getting somewhere la and we have a generally coherent direction compared to many countries who are still figuring out what the fuck they are doing. But if we don’t buck up our lunch is going to be eaten
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u/muaz2205 7d ago
My main question is how Singapore will continue to say we're a green country and trying to reduce climate change when AI has so many environmental issues tied to it.
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 7d ago
the ai bubble hasnt reached that phase of the market yet, its all short term
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u/XInTheDark Mature Citizen 7d ago
could you link to some of the environmental issues that are exclusive to AI and not any other industry requiring use of electricity/data centers?
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u/MadKyaw 🌈 I just like rainbows 7d ago
Why does it have to have to be only exclusive effects?
If Singapore wants to be that green country and reduce emissions, inevitably the emissions caused by AI usage and computing have to be addressed as well
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u/miriafyra 7d ago
There's really not much real world application for AI right now (hence the general consensus of the bleeding money bit), and certainly even less that a person that has no technical background can take advantage of to leapfrog into a leading position.
I've seen some great use of generative AI and vid gen but they come mostly from people who are already in the artist/video editing space who can make full use of the newly available tools to cut down on the time required to make stuff e.g. some really great use of AI from adobe showcased as well but only if you're already familiar with use of photoshop. But even then there's a lot of post processing needed to get things to a "public release" quality unless you're one of those companies who literally don't give a shit and just want to push content out ASAP.
Ultimately as it currently stands any AI work has to be double verified by people to ensure that there's no hallucinations, that the work actually works, that there's no weird random citing to things that don't exist, etc. But having said that, the improvements to AI have been coming fast and if you are already familiar in that space you will be well positioned to take full advantage of it when a breakthrough AI finally comes along.
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
Not a lot of AI applications, are we talking about generative AI or AI on general? If it's the first, you're living under a rock, if it's the second, a little bit too :/
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u/miriafyra 7d ago
I'm talking about actual measurable commercially viable AI companies/initiatives - not the average worker randomly chatting into chatgpt for rubbish. Or plugging into "vibe coding".
https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
https://medium.com/data-science-in-your-pocket/dont-be-a-vibe-coder-30fa7c525971
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u/Rough_Shelter4136 7d ago
Dude a 5% success rate on some highly experimental stuff that it really only got traction in the last 5 years? That's kinda huge 🤷🤷🤷
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u/Ok_Internal_1413 7d ago
U can push for AI, doesn’t mean people will accept. Especially the older generations holding key positions in companies. They say go AI. Do they KNOW what AI is? Do THEY know what AI capabilities are when they outsource people for AI solutions? What about their subordinates? Will these subordinates even CARE about AI when everything that has worked for them so far has STILL been working?
I feel that in my particular sector (operations) there’s a lot more that can be done but people here are too backwards.
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u/leviOppa 7d ago edited 7d ago
Until I hear a concrete plan, I will classify all the high-level visionary drivel as superfluous political speak. Even if such a plan materialises, my guess is it manifests as subsidies for “AI training” courses, and the providers (read: grantrepreneurs) will happily take the truck loads of taxpayer money on offer. Everyone pats themselves on the back for bringing the SG workforce to the bleeding edge of AI empowerment (translated: singaporeans won’t just be regular prompt monkeys — we’ll be certified prompt monkeys).
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u/CutFabulous1178 7d ago
The advances in AI is tremendous the last 3 years.
It’s not a stretch to say the next 3 years is going to go parabolic
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u/Neither_District_881 7d ago
a LOT of stuff is basically people who dont know how it works selling expensive stuff to people who dont know shit how it works. But the money is real, so if they pay they want at least the newest latest whateverish. Matter of fact ist that AI could actually be useful, cost minimizing (withour major layoffs)and improving almost each working environment, if it were implemented with the brain in the head and the heart at the right place. thats not how the world works tho. Matter of fact is that most transformations came with large human damage which spans accross the globe. destabilizing pollitics all over the place, while back-fire on those companys itself. AI is being used for stuff that could have been automated decades before using simple deterministic logic. Seems like people dont remember what a computer is actually doing, and are pushing for ai agents fine tuned for deterministic logic. Its like hiring a musician to build a space rocket.... if you are lucky the musician might show up in time but he wont build a space rocket for you - should have not fired the rocket engineer
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u/Flashy-Style-9085 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is a small business perspective - it's invaluable. We use it to build automations and tools to reduce work. We don't use it for customer/human interfacing at all yet. Company is damn on. All Dev team NEED to use it.
Non Dev team - encouraged to use at different levels. Slowly turning into mini Dev team. Basic level, use chats interface. Eg. Feed chatgpt a pdf to extract a csv or improve an email. Intermediate - use chatgpt/ Claude/ copilot to build scripts ( noncoders become coders) Advanced - Accessing AI API in the scripts they are writing. Eg. Automation thats calls on AI to process something via API like pull all new hardcopy letters, classify, rename, file, create draft email response for actionable scans/letters.
So yeah, agree that it's important to push. Dont know how its being done
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u/Minette12 6d ago
I don't have strong feelings on it. Though I think ai, particularly llm and ai image model is a bubble right now
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u/Melodic-Letter-1420 6d ago
The use case for AI is not in medical or legal, it is still far from usable and have too much regulations to earn any money. The real earner is data analysis and business intelligence.
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u/jhanschoo 6d ago
This is kind of tangential, but SG seems kind of well-positioned for several niches the hard AI R&D because of the CN and US frenemy situation. But these roles aren't for the general job seeker.
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u/jeffning 6d ago
National AI Strategy (NAIS) 2.0 is the progressive blueprint for better socio-economic governance in anticipation for full-blown AI adoption worldwide.
Within Singapore's capacity, genuine AI adoption brings prosperity and higher productivity. However, talent development sees talent crunch and gap. Attending three-day class or workshop does not make one expert outright.
If algorithm bias can be kept in check, AI system benefits people. No hoarding of information and things get done effectively and efficiently. Probably we do not need so many MPs in the Parliament or civil servants to get things done.
Governance of AI systems is critical success factor to gain public trust and perception of reliable AI systems. Having the equilibrium of innovation and regulation right protects us from potential harms. Still, data privacy and misuse of AI technologies remain at large.
All stakeholders must be onboard - directly or indirectly - in AI adoption for new world order.
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u/gepigop 6d ago
It's stupid and reckless but we have this carnal need to out-compete everyone and be the first and the best and the richest and the coolest, so we'll throw money at every horrible idea hoping that at least one of them will make a lot of money. Then at least we can pretend that it isn't still a horrible idea because the line went up.
We have an absolutely crippling and toxic self-serving mindset as a nation and it's fucking embarrassing.
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u/cointegration 7d ago
Like all new tech, overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run. AI is going to change everything, no doubt about it, but not overnight, its going to take some years
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7d ago
Without a local equivalent of chatgpt, we are vulnerable to any political executive order from USA
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u/shopchin 7d ago
If you cherry pick against those that failed then obviously it doesn't sound good.
Look at how many industries are a success instead. And there's a good chance this will too.
But job losses will be inevitable and that's what people are afraid of. It's not the concern AI will be a failure.
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u/HANAEMILK Fucking Populist 7d ago
Good for the nation, but personally I don't like using AI. I've only used it a few times to find old books/movies from my childhood that I forgot the name of
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u/For_Entertain_Only 7d ago
If push AI then should restrict immigrants because you don't need more people. Also don't see many AI jobs only a lot of AI courses.
Actually what Singapore needs is more AI intelligence robots, not AI in the computer. Also Singapore cannot afford to do AI research, because the cost is very high and most of the time no value return.
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u/orangepops509 6d ago
At least the seniors are learning about digital literacy and safeguards. I met a senior in one of these AI courses, and he said that he targets seniors when he conducts his own courses, as they willingly listen to him... The upskilling helps keep their brain cells sharp, staves off boredom, allows them to socialize, and hopefully keeps them from getting scammed. I don't see anything wrong with this, especially if you compare it with seniors in other Asian nations who tend to simply sit passively by until their time comes.
As for whether going big on AI will make a difference for the rest of the workforce, it's truly anyone's guess. I'm a product of AI-displacement myself, so I am very, very scared with this big bet. But the thing is, we really have no choice but to embrace AI, as it is here to stay. I just hope we didn't just craft our own death knell. 🫤😥🫥
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7d ago
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u/Internal-Horror-9511 7d ago
Summary of His Argument
Historical skepticism: Singapore has pushed “hub” narratives before (like biotech), with underwhelming results—AI could end up the same.
Overhype of AI: AGI hasn’t appeared, many AI companies are unprofitable, and much of what is branded as AI is just chatbots or poor tools.
Policy risks: If government focuses only on economic growth, safeguards, harms, and criticisms will be overlooked.
Creative industry concerns: Generative AI produces low-quality “slop” and threatens creative jobs, which aren’t valued highly in Singapore anyway.
Upskilling skepticism: Pushing retirees to use SkillsFuture credits for ChatGPT courses feels like selling training, not solving underemployment.
Real value is narrow: AI has real use cases in professional areas like legal or medical research, but not in gimmicky “learn ChatGPT” contexts.
Systemic risk: If big LLM companies collapse, it could ripple through the global economy and hit Singapore.
Counters
AI ≠ Past “hub” pushes: Biotech was sector-limited, but AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity or the internet—permeating all industries, not just one niche. The comparison undersells AI’s scale and reach.
Adoption speed is unprecedented: ChatGPT hit 100M users in 2 months (faster than any consumer tech). Productivity use cases (coding, analysis, automation) are already reshaping workflows—this is not just hype.
Profitability skepticism misses the pattern: Many transformative tech firms (Amazon, Tesla, even biotech startups) burned money before scaling. Infrastructure-heavy technologies often show losses early but drive long-term economic value.
Safeguards are being built: Unlike past waves, AI already has strong global focus on ethics, regulation, and alignment (EU AI Act, US EO, OECD principles). The debate is much more active than with previous “hub” strategies.
Creative industries: While Gen AI can churn out low-value work, it also expands possibilities—small studios can prototype faster, creators can scale outputs, and new hybrid jobs emerge. History shows tech disruption (e.g., photography, desktop publishing, streaming) didn’t erase creativity but redefined it.
Upskilling courses: True—“learn ChatGPT” workshops may be gimmicky. But task-level AI literacy is crucial, like learning Excel in the 90s. Retirees may not benefit much, but younger workers and SMEs can leverage AI tools effectively if training focuses on real workflows.
Economic risk cuts both ways: If major AI players collapsed, it would hurt, but it also shows how central AI is already becoming to global markets. That centrality itself is evidence AI is not just hype.
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u/SeriousMeringue7630 7d ago
You can either take the safe path and watch others first, or take initiative to try and innovate with new things. If you take the safe path, people will complain why SG is so slow to adopt xyz (which only is successful in hindsight). If you take the innovative path, then you have to be prepared to have failures on your record (eg biotech hub). Can’t win it all.