Building the AI Engineer Nation — with Josephine Teo, Minister of Digital Development and Information, Singapore

Singapore's GovTech is hosting an AI CTF challenge with ~$15,000 in prizes, starting October 26th, open to both local and virtual hackers. It will be hosted on Dreadnode's Crucible platform; signup here!

It is common to say if you want to work in AI, you should come to San Francisco.

Not everyone can. Not everyone should. If you can only do meaningful AI work in one city, then AI has failed to generalize meaningfully.

As non-Americans working in the US, we know what it’s like to see AI progress so rapidly here, and yet be at a loss for what our home countries can do. Through Latent Space we’ve tried to tell the story of AI outside of the Bay Area bubble; we talked to Notion in New York and Humanloop and Wondercraft in London and HuggingFace in Paris and ICLR in Vienna, and the Reka, RWKV, and Winds of AI Winter episodes were taped in Singapore (the World’s Fair also had Latin America representation and we intend to at least add China, Japan, and India next year).

The Role of Government with AI

As an intentionally technical resource, we’ve mostly steered clear of regulation and safety debates on the podcast; whether it is safety bills or technoalarmism, often at the cost of our engagement numbers or ability to book big name guests with a political agenda. When SOTA shifts 3x faster than it takes to pass a law, when nobody agrees on definitions of important things, when you can elicit never-before-seen behavior by slightly different prompting or sampling, it is hard enough to simply keep up to speed, so we are happy limiting our role to that. The story of AI progress has more often been achieved in the private sector, usually in spite of, rather than with thanks to, government intervention.

But industrial policy is inextricably linked to the business of AI, which we do very much care about, has an explicitly accelerationist intent if not impact, and has a track record of success in correcting for legitimate market failures in private sector investment, particularly outside of the US. It is with this lens we approach today’s episode and special guest, our first with a sitting Cabinet member.

Singapore’s National AI Strategy

It is well understood that much of Singapore’s economic success is attributable to industrial policy, from direct efforts like the Jurong Town Corporation industrialization to indirect ones like going all in on