New Initiatives to Advance Singapore’s National AI Strategy Unveiled
- By Paul Mah
- February 07, 2024
The ExploreAI summit last week saw the unveiling of new joint initiatives to further accelerate AI adoption across government and industry in support of Singapore’s second National AI Strategy, also known as NAIS 2.0.
ExploreAI was held at the Singapore office of Google Asia Pacific at Mapletree Business City.
Trailblazers 2.0
Building on the success of the first iteration of AI Trailblazers which saw the creation of over 100 generative AI use cases from 84 organizations across government and industry, an expanded initiative named AI Trailblazers 2.0 was announced.
AI Trailblazers 2.0 aims to help up to 150 more organizations in Singapore rapidly build generative AI solutions to address their real-world challenges. This expanded initiative will feature enhanced “Innovation Sandboxes” designed to provide participating organizations with access to Google Cloud’s unified AI stack, as well as support from Google Cloud engineers, at no cost for up to 10 weeks.
It is understood that organizations can take advantage of Gemini and Duet AI for Developers. Gemini was launched late last year, and trained with Google’s own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. More details on AI Trailblazers 2.0 will be announced in the coming weeks.
“We are glad to learn that the AI Trailblazers initiative has increased the development and adoption of gen AI among companies based in Singapore. Through this program, participants capitalized on the transformative impact of gen AI and developed applications to improve their business,” said Philbert Gomez, the vice president and head of Digital Industry Singapore (DISG).
“These efforts will contribute to Singapore’s ambition of becoming a hub for AI innovation. With the success of the first AI Trailblazers initiative, we look forward to continuing this partnership with Google Cloud and will announce further details on AI Trailblazers 2.0 soon,” said Gomez.
Training AI practitioners
To support the Government’s goal of increasing the number of local AI practitioners over the next three to five years, Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) will become the first institute of higher learning in Singapore to incorporate advanced industry training programs from Google Cloud into its core curriculum for more than 1,000 full-time diploma students in its School of Information Technology.
These training programs include Google Cloud’s Cloud Digital Leader certification, Professional Data Engineer certification, courses on training image classification models, and courses on building and deploying AI solutions on Vertex AI.
As we reported late last year, NAIS 2.0 was billed as a whole-of-government and whole-of-economy approach to bring the benefits of AI to Singapore and the region. NAIS 2.0 includes plans to triple the existing AI talent pool to 15,000 from about 4,500 currently.
“We aim to scale up AI for compelling use cases in areas like advanced manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, education and public services and bring benefits to others and to ourselves in Singapore,” said Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong at that time.
Image credit: Google Cloud
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.