Written by Pappu Sarada Pranav.
Passive Learning Is No Longer Enough
5 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
Written by Pappu Sarada Pranav.
5 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
AI Engineer Singapore was one of those events that made me leave feeling both insanely inspired and slightly embarrassed by how much further I still have to go.
I came in already grateful because I had managed to get one of the 20 sponsored student tickets. That alone meant a lot. As a student, being able to sit in the same rooms as people actually building the future of AI is not something I take lightly. So first, a massive thank you to 65Labs for organising this, and to Rachael De Foe, Sherry Jiang, Agrim Singh, Ainul Md Razib, Patrick Kelly, Neil Chang, Hsu Ken Ooi, Ivan Leo, Kaspar Hidayat, and Zayne Zhang for sponsoring the student seats. I really appreciate you guys for making it possible for us to be there.
The people who sponsored us probably had no direct reason to do it, but they still chose to open the door for younger builders. I think that is one of the most important parts of building a real scene. It is not only about who is already doing impressive work, but also about whether they are willing to bring more people into the room.
Day 1 alone already gave me so much to think about. The workshops left me with two strong project ideas that I am actually excited to build and share on X. But the projects were only one part of it. The bigger value came from being surrounded by people who were clearly operating at a very high level. Across the workshops, expos at Pullman and Kempinski, random conversations, and even the afterparty, I tried to make full use of the opportunity. I asked people about ideas I had, whether the directions made sense, where they thought the industry was heading, what was worth learning, what was hype, and how they kept up when the space is changing so quickly.
Those conversations were probably the most valuable part of the whole event for me. There is a huge difference between consuming AI content online and talking to people who are actually building things in real time. Online, everything becomes a stream of model releases, demos, tweets, papers, benchmarks, hot takes, and arguments. It is very easy to feel like you are learning just because you are constantly seeing new things. But at the conference, it became obvious that the people who truly understood what was happening were the ones building through it. They were not just reacting to the latest release. They were testing ideas, breaking systems, forming opinions from experience, and constantly updating their taste.
That reinforced something I have been feeling more and more strongly: in AI, you really have to build or die. I do not mean that in a dramatic hustle culture way. I mean that the field is moving too fast for passive learning to be enough. When new tools, workflows, models, agent patterns, infra ideas, and research directions appear every few days, the only way to develop real understanding is to build. You have to try things for yourself, get stuck, debug the weird edge cases, see where the abstractions leak, and figure out what actually matters underneath.
This came up again and again from different builders, including Vivian Balakrishnan and Geoffrey Huntley. Geoff’s point about building closer to bare metal especially stayed with me. It made me think about how easy it is to stay at the surface layer of AI right now. There are so many polished wrappers and tools that make you feel “productive”. But if I actually want to build things that matter, and not just follow whatever is trending, I need to push myself closer to the fundamentals while still shipping fast enough to keep up with the field.
That was probably the most humbling part of the event. I have built things I am proud of, but being around so many strong builders made me realise there are levels and levels to this. Some people I spoke to had such sharp instincts about products, infra, research, and the direction of the industry that I left the conversations thinking, “okay, I need to lock in way harder.” But it felt crazy inspiring instead of discouraging.
By the end of the event, I felt like my sense of what is possible had expanded. AI Engineer Singapore gave me project ideas, but more importantly, it gave me a clearer picture of the bar. It made me want to ship faster, learn deeper, ask better questions, and stop waiting for perfect clarity before building. The people I met were not waiting for permission or some perfect roadmap. They were just building, learning, sharing, and figuring things out in public.
I also left feeling much more optimistic about the Singapore AI scene. Sometimes it is easy to think the real action is somewhere else, but this event made the local community feel very real. People showed up. People built. People shared openly. People cared enough to make sure younger builders could be part of it too.
So once again, thank you to 65Labs and to everyone who sponsored a student seat. You gave us momentum, exposure, and a much clearer sense of what kind of builders we should aim to become. That’s why I loved this event like crazy, and I am leaving it inspired to build harder because, after all, we are the scene.