AI

OpenAI to open Singapore office

And why it's no big deal.

Paul Mah

Paul Mah

— 2 min read
OpenAI to open Singapore office
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Peter Nguyen

OpenAI will open a Singapore office this year. Here's why it's not as big a deal as it sounds, and why it's important to Singapore, nonetheless.

OpenAI has announced plans to open an office in Singapore later this year, part of an expansion that sees it adding 5 new offices to its existing 4.

New:

  • NYC.
  • Paris.
  • Seattle.
  • Brussels.
  • Singapore.

Existing:

  • San Francisco.
  • London.
  • Dublin.
  • Tokyo.

OpenAI in Singapore

Here's what we know so far:

  • Will hire five to 10 roles here by this year.
  • Roles in: Policy, sales, cybersecurity, solutions.
  • Will partner with AI Singapore to develop AI for SEA.

The partnership will see OpenAI providing up to US$1M to AI Singapore's regional collaborators to develop resources for better SEA-centric AI models.

AI Singapore and Sea-Lion

AI Singapore is a national programme created to build an AI ecosystem and put Singapore on the world map for AI.

It is also developing the Sea-Lion family of LLM, which was created to focus on Southeast Asian culture and language.

  • The original Sea-Lion was trained from scratch using 8x Nvidia A100 GPUs with a lean team of 20 Singaporeans.
  • Sea-Lion v2, released without fanfare in August, was built on Meta's Llama 3.

When I spoke with Leslie Teo earlier this year, I was impressed by the great pains his team took to source data ethically for Sea-Lion.

Anyway, the US$1M will serve to improve the availability and quality of SEA data.

Why it matters

To be honest, the US$1M is not even a drop in OpenAI's massive war chest, which saw an infusion of US$6.6B last week.

And OpenAI's opening of an office in Singapore is more to serve its business interests and potentially influence AI policy - there's no AI training or R&D.

Yet not having an OpenAI office here could have negative connotations, given Singapore's efforts to develop itself as an AI hub. So it's a good thing.

The announcement had a couple of interesting tidbits:

  • Singapore among highest per capital users of AI.
  • Weekly active users DOUBLED since start-2024.

So, most of you reading this are probably using AI in some shape or form! How are you using AI today?

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