Written by Soon Fu Hong Wilson.
It doesn’t feel complete without students
6 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
Written by Soon Fu Hong Wilson.
6 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
I am Wilson, an incoming Final Year student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) studying Computer Science. I am 1 of 20 students to be sponsored by 65labs and individual builders who bet on us and allow the privilege to experience the entire conference.
“It doesn’t feel complete without students” — that is the motive for setting aside sponsorship solely for the inclusion of students like myself.
It is about sending messages that one or a team of many strongly believes in. 65labs have envisioned and set out to accomplish some amazing points about Singapore, and I have captured from their sincerity behind their actions in-person and online such as:
It is about a new mindset, to find clarity in a world and industry that is changing in a way that is considered a major revolution. Companies are leveraging the powerful inference of AI now to come up with use cases that differentiate themselves. It is now more about AI tools assembly for applied AI users, and a much more exciting time for people researching and improving these capabilities.
Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan showing his own setup, delivering his idea of a AI-forward country. In his address, he mentioned that every AI user should be accountable for their usage of delegations of tasks. To be comfortable about the work we own, is the new challenge and new bar we should rise to meet which will prove difficult with so many innovative ways to use AI more than ever.
Gavriel Cohen from NanoCo created a more secure and lightweight Claw agent that is NanoClaw, one that Gavriel personally demonstrated himself by sharing a Telegram bot containing his personal emails, calendar and call notes. This is one exemplary case of improving communications with security trustworthiness in modern technology.
Boris Starkov from ElevenLabs touched on the technical difficulties of to create a voice agent that feels human. In an age where the bottleneck is more highly attributed to reviewing than building, voice agents has proven to become an essential focus area to minimise time spent on the building process, which is the time spent on communicating with coding agents.
Phil Hedayatnia from Airfoil and Sabina Cabrera from MagicPath giving incredible insights on design especially in the current times. They touched on how current designs generated by AI still results in the same recognisable “slop” as described by engineers and people familiar with the term in the tech space. This is because AI are still in its essence, pattern recognition machines, which cannot transcend the psychological feeling that humans have in crafting the most ideal design.
AI has advanced enough to become an empowering tool. It has enabled people to continue their passion with advancements in Brain interface technology — allowing Kai Ming Ng to interact and draw and paint with Tesseract.art.
It’s about being less uptight and to get yourself out there to know communities, and to convey messages through presence from actions. There is one really good quick guide by Brian Chew on where to go to for people who want to start. AI Engineer Conference has also brought together most of those people together, from its main events to its side events and I got the chance to talk to some community builders mentioned in the list. Sometimes, these communities also attract representatives across the globe, for example AI Engineer saw very ambitious people from San Francisco, New York, Zurich, Dublin, Shanghai, Thailand, Malaysia, which is one point 65labs really feel strongly for, that Singapore is a melting pot of talents and changing the belief that the only way forward is out. And this is just one side — community building, but what that mindset could translate to other applications in life prompts as a very good question to myself personally.
I thought that this was going to be a paid-only event, until 1 week before the main conference happened, 65labs announced that they would be sponsoring 20 students for the event, and out of their own pockets when plans had changed. The very belief of getting people together has always stayed with them and Rachael De Foe tried as much as possible to arrange opportunities for students to meet with speakers from the event. The organising team also made it a point to let students not just in the event, but to be seen and heard, with arranged front row seats for day 1 of the main talks and personal 1-1 introductions with the Minister.
They really believe that it is more than just a conference where you can hear and be inspired from amazing ideas, it is feeling that you leave the place with, the accessibility to people, the conversations which could happen to people beside you and lead to exciting opportunities.
The main talks on stage are also publicly available on YouTube:
Day 1 — youtube.com/watch?v=_xQnSNlBP_w
Day 2 — youtube.com/watch?v=m12vGjfbNlo
From the perspective of a student, the access to general information has become less competitive. However, the bar has increased in knowing where to reach out to these information in the first place. Through my capacity as an individual honoured and grateful to be sponsored a ticket, I then got access to information on what social media channels to use, such as X as another means to connect with builders in the community, and how to use it as it is different from LinkedIn which I am more familiar with.
It’s also about getting people from places where it has proved different and made people more hungry and bringing them to a location that’s more accessible to some, such as students. It’s about always constantly thinking what else can we do to make something better, to include some spaces for students like us in an event like this. It’s about feeling genuine.
If there’s one takeaway from me, it is to not be afraid to try — to do what you are passionate for, and to put yourself out there and know people in communities to discuss ideas, learn new things that can further propel your interests and learn more about the world.