Cheap AI like China’s Deepseyk, like Singapore’s Digital Minister Josephine Theo, says “are welcome”
Singapore would welcome cheap models like China’s Deepsyk, and the country’s digital minister is trying to find ways for small countries and businesses to profit from AI without paying the exorbitant price of technology.
Companies considering using AI will inevitably need to consider costs, Singapore’s Minister of Digital Development and Information Josephine Theo explained at the Fortune Brainstorming AI Singapore conference on Tuesday.
“Innovations like Deepseek are welcome in terms of reducing costs,” she said.
Deepseek’s AI model has sparked Trillion Dollar Sell Earlier this year in the US financial markets. The Chinese AI startup has proven You can create AI models This coincided with the performance of the cutting-edge models, while using significantly less resources to train. Tech stocks plummeted as they reassessed whether massive capital spending was truly worth it in the pursuit of AI military. US Big Technology has recovered from the sale of Deepseek, Microsoft and Amazon It reportedly reassessing spending on data centers.
Next, Deepseek sparked Surge in Chinese technology stocksas investors were trying to acquire AI development in the world’s second largest economy.
Teo revealed that Singapore is not using Deepseek in its own AI development plan, but noted that it is part of a wider change in this new technology. Reflecting global needs.
“I know that large-scale linguistic models trained primarily in western corpus are mostly in English as languages, which are likely to be difficult to apply in Southeast Asian contexts,” she explained.
AI, which is trained in English rather than one of the hundreds of different languages in Southeast Asia, “probably fails to meet the requirements of Singapore and its neighbors.”
Singapore helped to nurture Southeast Asian languages with One Network (Sea-lion) project, a large group of open source language models trained in many regional languages such as Vietnam and Malay.
US, China… and Singapore
Singapore officials tried Chart the middle pass It expresses its hope that neither side will match between Washington and Beijing. Southeast Asian countries are US security ally, but also maintain close cultural and economic ties with China.
“Singapore’s consistent approach is to act in a way that fulfills our own interests,” Theo said. “We certainly hope that the relationship between the two giants can warm up much bigger, but that’s not what we want to happen, and that’s what will happen.”
Still, Theo said that Singapore can learn from both the US and China when it comes to AI. For example, TEO cited AI governance as one of its areas of collaboration with Washington.
Meanwhile, China offers examples of how to use AI. “We have found that China’s Industrial Foundation is very broad and deep and very interesting to see and learn about the application of AI,” she said.
Singapore will also develop AI skills at home. On Tuesday, Theo explained how he plans to expand the country’s pool of “AI practitioners” to “people in the profession,” and how he plans to lawyers, doctors, accountants and manufacturing workers.
“They can use AI to acquire this facility and then show how they can create more value for their organization,” she said.