Written by Benjamin Chek Jun Kiet.
Singapore’s AI Ecosystem Needs More Asymmetric Bets
5 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
Written by Benjamin Chek Jun Kiet.
5 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
Before attending the AI Engineer (AIE) event, my view of the Singapore AI ecosystem was largely fragmented. I had seen pieces of it scattered across different venues: a concentrated burst of energy at a weekend hackathon, a niche technical meetup, asynchronous debates on X, or the formalised conversations when talking to companies for university partnerships. The ecosystem existed, but it felt disjointed.
Walking into AIE, the immediate takeaway was a sense of awe. For the first time, the ecosystem was physically manifesting in a single room. People were actively showing up for Singapore. Behind the standard conference trappings of sponsor booths, scheduled talks, and obligatory side-networking, there was a palpable shift in gravity. What struck me was also the working adult volunteers. Many were there simply because they wanted to help people navigate this rapidly shifting space. In an environment that usually defaults to highly transactional interactions, seeing people dedicate time purely to facilitate the community made me genuinely optimistic about Singapore's trajectory. It proved that we have the foundational human capital required to build a real community, not just a talent pool.
However, a functioning community is only the baseline; it is not the frontier. If AIE served as a mirror for the local ecosystem, it reflected both our strengths and our glaring structural blind spots.
This became evident during the in-between moments of the conference. I had a conversation with someone from Singtel who is helping to drive AI transformation within the company. It was a pragmatic look at how large-scale local enterprises are attempting to integrate these models into their legacy systems. Yet, it also served as a sobering reality check. I was given a glimpse into the sheer scale, depth, and penetration of personal AI usage in places like China, and in contrast, our local enterprise transformation feels like we are playing catch-up on a solved problem rather than pushing the boundaries of what is possible. We are focused on operational efficiency, while other ecosystems are fundamentally rewiring how humans interact with technology daily.
I was also inspired during my conversation with Daria Soboleva, the Head of Research at Cerebras. Despite her busy schedule, she was genuinely excited to meet students. What I learnt from her is that big ideas fundamentally come from emotions. True innovation doesn't usually start because you want to incrementally improve a benchmark, it starts because you violently hate the way something currently works, and you want to change it.
That emotional drive to build is exactly what crystallised my thoughts on learning in AI. AIE cemented the reality that in this field, you have to show while telling. The theoretical understanding of a model is not helpful if you cannot instantiate it, break it, and understand its constraints in the real world. You have to continue working on cool, difficult things, and more importantly, you have to find others who are doing the same. The diverse AIE student cohort helped me meet people from outside my own university circles - students who are in high school now that are in a position that I was a few years ago, students from other universities who spend most of their time at tech events, and other students who I would not have the chance to have a conversation with. It was inspiring to ask people how they think, why they make the technical trade-offs they do, and critically, how they choose to allocate their most finite resource: their time.
But if we are to take these lessons and actually push Singapore to the frontier of AI, we need a cultural rewiring. Currently, our ecosystem lacks a distinct identity. We need more diversity in thought, not just in the corporate sense, but a diversity of builders, researchers, and thinkers who are willing to approach the technology from orthogonal angles. We critically need more people dedicated to pushing boundaries rather than just API integration. Even if we lack the rotating talent from frontier labs and startups that other ecosystems like San Francisco have, we should not limit ourselves from pursuing big questions. Agentic evaluation tools, harnesses like Cursor and Codex, and solving domain-specific problems with customised tools still require a lot of ingenuity and innovation, even if they are not about training the best foundation model.
Most importantly, we have to overcome the single biggest bottleneck in the Singaporean tech ecosystem: the absence of asymmetric bets.
There is a deep reluctance to speculate on raw, unproven talent or to shoot someone's potential and opportunity sky-high before they have a massive portfolio to justify it. In mature ecosystems, capital and support flow toward ambitious outliers who might fail spectacularly. Here, support flows toward those who promise not to fail.
This culture of safety trickles down to the student level. Students in Singapore need to be inspired to start startups that solve incredibly hard, messy problems in the physical and digital world. They should want to tackle fundamental human problems, and they should have the audacity to rope their smartest friends into doing these hard things with them. Instead, too many default to building safe, incremental, lifestyle oriented SaaS because that is what feels comfortable to start with, and are problems that they are aware of given their limited perspective.
AIE was a necessary milestone that showcased how much Singapore has evolved over the past year. But the event also made it clear that just showing up is no longer enough. If Singapore wants to truly operate at the frontier, we need an ecosystem that runs on the emotional drive to build better systems, prioritises showing over telling, and is finally willing to take irrational bets on the people trying to build the future.