According to Cointelegraph, Singapore is eyeing 2024 as the year to scale its Southeast Asian-focused artificial intelligence (AI) models for commercial use and become a hub for the technology. 

Sources revealed that AI Singapore, a government-led initiative, is planning to develop the country’s own AI models, particularly those that cater to local populations.

It is believed that  SEA-LION is an open-source ChatGPT-like large language model (LLM) built by AI Singapore to represent the languages and cultures of southeast Asia. The model is expected to be trained on data in 11 languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, and Bahasa Indonesia, among others. The model is expected to be ready in 2024, added Cointelegraph.

“We are building a larger corpus for pre-training and hope to hit 2-3 trillion soon. Once that is done, we will further develop SEA-LION to 30-50B parameters this year, and extend SEA-LION into a multimodal speech-text model,” Leslie Teo, senior director, AI products,  AI Singapore, concluded.