The island nation of Singapore is eyeing 2024 as the year to scale its Southeast Asian-focused artificial intelligence (AI) models for commercial use and become a global hub for the technology.
A government-led initiative called AI Singapore is leading the way in developing the country’s own AI models, particularly those that cater to local populations.
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 and is set to be the first in a series of SEA-LION LLMs. The model has been trained on data in 11 languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, and Bahasa Indonesia, which it plans to have ready in 2024.
Dr. Leslie Teo, senior director of AI products at AI Singapore, told Cointelegraph that they plan to release a better instruction-tuned model in the next few weeks.
“This will come in a version that will be commercially permissible as well as one that is not licensed for commercial use due to the data we used,” he said.
