AI innovation should be measured by impact on people, Josephine Teo says at UN platform
She was laying out Singapore’s approach to AI development and adoption at a United Nations General Assembly platform.
Singapore's Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo, emphasized at a United Nations General Assembly platform on September 22 that the true measure of artificial intelligence innovation lies not in the models' power, but in their positive impact on people's lives. Speaking at the Digital@UNGA, Teo highlighted how the technology is being utilized across the public service to enhance efficiency and service delivery to citizens, with nearly 70% of public officers already utilizing AI tools for tasks like information analysis and draft preparation.
The government is also exploring the deployment of AI agents to streamline workflows while maintaining accountability for critical decisions. AI is further being applied to expedite the routing of public feedback to relevant agencies, identify anomalies in cargo shipments at Singapore's borders, and detect phishing and impersonation scams.
However, Teo stressed that for people to maintain trust in AI as its usage becomes more pervasive, safeguards must be put in place to address potential amplification of existing threats such as more convincing scams and cyberattacks. She noted that trust enables innovation to scale, contrary to the notion that it constrains it.
A third priority is to broaden AI participation, ensuring that more countries and communities can leverage the technology. Recognizing linguistic and cultural diversity in South-east Asia, Singapore has developed SEA-LION, a set of open-source AI models tailored for South-east Asian languages, accents, and cultural contexts. AI Singapore is collaborating with partners like the Gates Foundation, Google, and the United Nations Development Programme on Project ATLAS, which aims to create AI-ready datasets for under-represented languages worldwide.
Teo emphasized that countries do not need to develop their own frontier AI models, which demand substantial computing resources and capital. Instead, they should focus on adapting existing AI technologies to suit their specific languages, cultures, and needs. This approach, according to Teo, can significantly expand AI inclusion.
She also shared Singapore's experience with other nations through the Digital Pillar of the Forum of Small States and provided open-source digital tools and resources through the Singapore Digital Gateway, an online platform offering digital toolkits and capabilities. Teo concluded that the ultimate success of AI should be measured by the number of people empowered by it, not the power of the machines themselves.
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