Speech by Minister Josephine Teo at the Singapore Computer Society Tech3 Forum

SPEECH BY MINISTER JOSEPHINE TEO AT THE SINGAPORE COMPUTER SOCIETY (SCS) TECH3 FORUM ON 22 AUGUST 2024

Mr Sam Liew, President of the Singapore Computer Society,
Distinguished Guests,
Colleagues and Friends

INTRODUCTION

1. Good morning and thank you for inviting me once again to join you for the SCS Tech3 Forum.

2. I remember being here last year at this very ballroom, and it was polling day for the Presidential Election. Given your track record at picking an auspicious date, I wondered when I accepted your invitation this year whether 22 August would turn out to be another politically significant day.

3. Fortunately, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has already addressed us on Sunday night at the National Day Rally. You will be aware that he emphasised the need for us to both bold and prudent as we chart our way forward for Singapore.

4. And indeed, in seeking to develop the AI ecosystem in Singapore, we have taken a similar approach of being bold and prudent. In December last year, PM launched the refreshed National AI Strategy, or NAIS 2.0, setting out the key enablers that we believe will help us to realise the vision of AI for the Public Good, for Singapore and the world.

5. The following month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I launched international consultations for our Model Governance Framework for Generative AI which underscores the importance that we place on ensuring AI safety, even as we promote AI adoption.

6. In the past few months, we have introduced more initiatives – from research programmes, scholarships and talent attraction schemes to growing new peaks of excellence in AI through industry-led centres of excellence. As we expand compute capacity, we are investing in new and greener infrastructure. Through our partnerships with the US and China, we aim to strengthen access to AI expertise and promote inter-operable standards.

7. We are steadily building up the AI ecosystem in Singapore and gaining mindshare internationally. More importantly, we are seeing meaningful AI applications appear, sometimes in areas we least expect!

8. For example, last weekend, I was at the finale of the Build for Good accelerator programme, an initiative by the Open Government Products (OGP) team within GovTech. Many of you know OGP as our “special forces” behind some of the most successful digital products and services that power our digital government today; “Build for Good” is OGP’s “special project” to involve citizens in co-creation. One project applied machine learning to audio recordings collected from the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve to detect specific bird species. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is, both in terms of a technical difficulty, as well as its value to conservationists. Without the ability to correctly identify bird species and estimate their numbers, no environmental impact assessment is complete. Now, who were the people who developed the MVP? They were in fact, two students from NUS who met three LTA engineers during a Hackathon only a few months ago and discovered that they shared a common passion for nature.

9. There are many more people and projects like this that make good use of AI and Machine Learning (ML) to solve real-world problems and improve citizens’ lives. At the same time, commercial applications are growing. DBS, for example, has already developed more than 600 AI/ML models and 300 use cases, delivering economic value of S$180 million.

10. Along with greater AI adoption, we are making progress in AI safety. To help organisations evaluate AI models and applications for AI risks, we developed a testing framework and software toolkit called AI Verify; through Project Moonshot, we extended our work on AI Verify into Generative AI.

11. Last month, we introduced a set of Safety Guidelines for Generative AI Model Developers and App Deployers. We also gave a bigger push to the use of privacy-enhancing technologies, which are critical to ensuring continued access to good quality data for AI development.

12. I thank SCS for your active contributions to AI safety and commend you for putting together the AI Ethics and Governance Body of Knowledge 2.0 that Sam has just announced. It is certainly a useful industry-led complement to the Government’s efforts to promote responsible AI use.

EMPOWERING THE BROAD BASE

13. This morning, in line with what PM Wong had said at the National Day Rally about Government’s support for lifelong learning, I want to focus on one area of NAIS2.0 – that of empowering our people through skills upgrading.

14. Many thoughtful observers have pointed out that it is not so much AI displacing workers, but AI-proficient workers displacing AI-deficient workers. In other words, rather than “Humans vs AI”, it is going to be “Humans with AI” vs “Humans without AI”.

15. This is the way my team and I think of AI. And I hope it is how you think of AI too – not as a chance to get rid of people, but as an opportunity to empower people.

16. This is also why we want to support the entire workforce to be more AI-ready, and not just a narrow group of technologists. Put another way, not everyone can be an Olympic medallist like Max Maeder, but everyone can and should learn to enjoy some sports.

17. According to some analysts, Singaporeans are already quite AI-fit: Recently, young students from junior colleges as well as polytechnics won two gold medals at the first International Olympiad in AI.

18. The World Digital Competitive Index by the International Institute for Management Development ranks us third in our adaptive attitudes towards digital technology, particularly towards AI.

19. According to a study by KPMG and the University of Queensland, Singaporeans are amongst the highest users of AI in the workplace globally.

20. A frontier AI company recently shared with us that Singaporeans are the highest per capita users of their generative AI application, and LinkedIn’s Future of Work report says we are still one of the fastest in acquiring new AI skills.

21. These rankings sound great but please take them with a pinch of salt! They are not harmful, except if they make us complacent. Remember this: at the rate that AI is advancing, we can never be too AI-ready. If anything at all, they tell us that there is enthusiasm among our people to embrace AI. We should build on it, grow the momentum and align our efforts so that the enthusiasm translates into something useful.

22. One way of doing so is by updating the Skills Framework for Infocomm Technology (ICT), which IMDA and SkillsFuture Singapore first launched in 2016. The Framework works like a map, providing key information on existing and emerging skills in ICT, as well as the relevant job roles and career pathways. We will refresh this framework to incorporate generative AI skills. This will provide professionals across all fields with a valuable resource on the new skills needed to get the most out of generative AI. We have started consultations with key industry players, industry associations and the Institutes of Higher Learning to ensure that the updated Framework is aligned with their needs.

23. We will also expand the pool of qualified trainers. They are important because they serve as navigators, helping learners to identify their skills gaps and map out their next steps.

24. Today, before they can deliver SkillsFuture-approved programmes, trainers need to attain the Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) Advanced Certificate in Learning and Performance. This takes 88.5 hours over three months, which may be alright for a full-time trainer but is impractical for industry practitioners providing training on a part-time basis.

25. We will shorten the time it takes for practitioners with relevant industry knowledge to qualify as trainers. As earlier mentioned by Sam, in partnership with IMDA and SkillsFuture Singapore, the Singapore Computer Society will collaborate with the Institute for Adult Learning on an accelerated pathway that will take 40 hours, or less than half the previous duration. This accelerated pathway will be open to industry practitioners and qualify more of them to teach courses mapped to our Infocomm Technology Skills Framework. IMDA and the Singapore Computer Society will reach out to these practitioners soon.

TARGETED UPSKILLING FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT

26. Besides empowering the broad base, we will equip our people to succeed with AI-related skills in their respective fields of expertise.

27. We already have Jobs Transformation Maps, or JTMs, in 16 sectors that help individuals in hundreds of job roles understand the impact of technologies on the skills required of them.

28. For example, the JTM for Accountancy identifies AI as a revolutionary technology but also considers it a “valuable ally” for auditors to detect anomalies and generate deeper insights. It advises professionals in Financial Forensics to upskill to solve more complex cases and help clients prevent fraud, rather than just investigate after something bad has happened. It even suggests that those amongst these professionals who already have knowledge of digital forensics can transfer their skills and pivot to new job roles like “Ethical Hacking”!

29. Professionals in every domain will need help to master digital technologies such as AI. This includes professionals in the creative industries, such as graphic designers, marketers, film makers, artists, and authors. They have spent years honing their craft. Their talents and contributions should be enhanced, not diminished, by technology.

30. We have started to see more of our creative professionals use AI to their advantage. Recently, an advertising firm made a pitch to MDDI using a video generated by Midjourney, and another tool called Gen-3 Alpha developed by the company Runway. This AI-generated video drew on the past works done by the firm’s creative professionals and vividly conveyed the storyboard. The video made our discussions much more productive – we could talk about details like the music, how it should go with various scenes, and whether they work with the lighting levels that were proposed. And also, what were the facial expressions of the characters depicted in this video. Such a “draft” video would have been too costly to produce without Generative AI. From our perspective as the client, the fact that this particular firm had produced a video that so much more effectively conveys their concept put them at an edge, and that is what is meant by “Humans with AI” vs “Humans without AI”.

31. Creative professionals can also use AI in their everyday work, whether to scrub through scripts for errors, or to speed up the laborious process for correcting photo and video content. In fact, NTUC Learning Hub reports that marketing professionals are among the most avid users of AI to analyse data and optimise content.

32. This is why I’m very pleased to note that the Singapore Computer Society is partnering the Association of Advertising and Marketing Singapore, and the Singapore Association of Motion Picture Professionals. They will curate seminars and workshops to help creative professionals make the most of digital technologies such as AI-powered tools. This expands the existing partnerships the Society already has with relevant associations in other sectors such as Accounting, Banking & Finance, and Logistics. As in the past, IMDA will provide support through the TechSkills Accelerator programme to promote sector-specific digital upskilling.

CONCLUSION

33. I hope I have conveyed some sense of how we intend to be bold yet prudent in growing the AI ecosystem in Singapore, as part of our digital developments. We are steadily moving beyond the hype. With each passing day, we see more and more evidence of AI enhancing the way we work across multiple industries and organisations. We also see many enthusiastic efforts to use AI for the public good. As we gain experiences in these use cases, we will also improve our understanding of the risks. This will help us design stronger guardrails for AI safety, to uphold an environment of trust that is essential for innovation and experimentation.

34. In all of these efforts, we deeply appreciate the Singapore Computer Society for your steadfast support, and look forward to our continued partnership.

35. Thank you for always leaning forward. I wish you all a fruitful conference.