Singapore’s Digital Minister Josephine Teo says that China’s cheaper AI like Deepseek ‘is’ very welcome’
As smaller countries and companies try to discover how to benefit from AI without paying exorbitant prices for technology, Singapore will welcome China’s cheaper models such as Deepseek.
Companies that consider the use of AI inevitably take into account the cost, Singapore’s Digital Development and Information Minister Josephine Teo announced on Tuesday at the Fortune Brain Storm AI Singapore Conference
“In terms of reducing costs, innovations such as Deepseek are welcomed,” he said.
Deepseek’s AI models helped to make a trillion -dollar sales in the US financial markets earlier this year. The initiation of Chinese artificial intelligence has proved that it is possible to create AI models that match the performance of leading models, while using significantly less resources for education. Investors, the pursuit of the AI arms race, the big capital expenditures really worth it, the technology stocks fell as they re -evaluated it. US Big Tech, while getting rid of Deepseek Sellloff, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon They are still re -evaluating their expenditures on data centers.
In contrast, Deepseek has increased in Chinese technology stocks while investors are trying to buy AI developments in the world’s second largest economy.
Teo explained that Singapore did not use Deepseek in his own AI development plans, but he said that this is part of a wider change in this new technology that will reflect global needs.
“First of all, he will have difficulties to apply large language models trained on a Western Corpus in English, primarily in the context of Southeast Asia,” he said.
AI, who has been educated in English, which is not one of the hundreds of different languages of Southeast Asia, said, “Perhaps it will not meet the needs of our neighboring countries as well as Singapore”.
Singapore helped develop Southeast Asian languages in one Network (Sea-Lion) project, a large group of open sources trained in a series of regional languages such as Vietnam and Malay.
USA, China… and Singapore
Singapore officials tried to draw a mid -way between Washington and Beijing and expressed their desire not to align both sides. The Southeast Asian country is the US security ally of the US, but it also maintains its cultural and economic ties with China.
“Singapore’s consistent approach is to act in a way to meet our own interests, Teo Teo said. “We hope that the relationships between the two giants can warm up much more, but this is not something we may want to be and will be.”
Nevertheless, Teo said that Singapore could learn from both the US and China when it comes to AI. For example, Teo showed AI governance as a cooperation area with Washington.
China offers examples of how artificial intelligence can be used. “We realized that China’s Industrial Foundation is so wide and deep that it can be very interesting to watch and learn AI applications”.
And Singapore will also develop AI skills at home. On Tuesday, Teo announced how the country plans to expand the “AI practitioners” pool to “people in professions”: lawyers, doctors, accountants and production workers.
“Them [will] They can show this facility using AI and then show how they can create more value for their organizations. ”
