Name: Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Singapore tightens AI regulations on political content
Uploaded: 2024-07-30
Duration: 16 min 49 s
Description: Josephine TEO, Minister for Digital Development and Information, Singapore Moderator: Clay CHANDLER, Executive Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore

Josephine TEO, Minister for Digital Development and Information, Singapore Moderator: Clay CHANDLER, Executive Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Singapore tightens AI regulations on political content

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Good afternoon, everyone. And Mr C, thank you so much for making time to join us. Glad to be here. We're really thrilled to have you and everyone in Singapore has been so helpful and supportive to us in helping us to understand uh how A I is being adopted uh here in Singapore and around the rest of the region and really uh appreciate that. You know, Jeremy mentioned that Singapore was one of the first countries to embrace uh and unveil a national uh A I strategy. And I wonder if you could for people who may not know about Singapore's strategy, say a little bit about that and, and perhaps how Singapore's new uh National A I strategy 2.0 is different than the first one. Well, uh thank you for that opportunity, you know, back in 2019 that we put forward the National A I strategy. It wasn't as though no work had been done. In fact, about nine months, even before the strategy was launched, we did put forward a set of principles for A I governance. So what was quite interesting for me is that even in those years, we thought about governance before we actually launched the strategy. Fast forward to 2023. When we put together our National A I strategy 2.0 the circumstances had changed quite a lot. By that time, generative A I had become something that was very accessible. And so a very important consideration is along with democratizing access to A I, how about the democratization of risks as well? You will find it being more pervasive, there will be many more settings that A I may be used or misused. So how does our strategy take into account both the democratizing access benefit as well as the risk, democratization of generative A I? So in any 2.0 I would say a couple of features stand out in terms of the infrastructure that can support an A I ecosystem. How much compute capacity do you make available, particularly for segments of the community such as the research community that may find it harder to access, compute that was one important feature. And of course, we also know that there is no good A I without good data. The question is, how do we harvest data in a responsible way, taking into account people's concerns about privacy, taking into account companies and enterprise concerns about data protection and foster an environment that has responsible as well as active use of data. And I think another very important aspect to go along with it is that in any new field, the pool of talent is always going to be a concern. It's not broad enough, it's not deep enough. So what measures can we put in place to build up the A I talent to support the healthy growth of an ecosystem? And if you wrap all of these together, I would also say that it has challenged us to think differently about what it means to achieve excellence in A I governance, which is not just the guard rails that you put in place, but also the promotional factors that can help this ecosystem grow. I think one of the things that has impressed me as I've learned about the Singapore A I strategy is that it seems to be very collaborative and there seems to be um a a pretty constructive relationship between, you know, as you mentioned, academics, uh people in government, people in businesses, um a lot of informal institutions and as someone who, you know, is an American and kind of keeping an eye on the American system of adopting A I. But a lot of time in China, I see the sort of huge polarization between those two systems where China has taken a very, you know, put the very dense regulatory framework in first and the US has almost an allergy to any suggestion of a regulation. And Singapore seems to have found this very interesting middle uh way uh where it doesn't have explicit regulatory framework, but it does have rules and systems and norms and, and kind of understanding which is, which is interesting. Do you anticipate that Singapore down the road will, will have more explicit A I specific regulation? Well, in the first place, there are certain kinds of A I generated content, for example, that we already have guard rails against. So for example, we have a lot of against fake news. How do you deal with the content if it is A I generated? Well, it turns out the law is technology agnostic. It doesn't matter whether it was a person who wrote up that fake news or used A I to generate that fake news and that already helps us to have some buffer. But there are also other areas of A I risks that need further effort specific again to A I generated content. What if the A I generated content was applied in the context of political elections? And this is something that already is observed in other countries where elections are taking place. I've said this before that we will have to look at what are the measures and what new laws need to be introduced. Um We are actively studying um the Korean, for example, put in place a law to ban political content that is generated using A I in the 90 days, that is the run up to their election. But in our case, we don't have a clear window over 90 days. So to what extent can we replicate a law like that, but I should just add that A I generation content is just one part of it. There are other aspects of risk that we also make available a set of principles that we'd like people to adhere to. So just as in 2019 before we had the strategy, we had the model A I governance framework this time round very soon after we published our updated national A I strategy, we also updated our model A I governance framework for generative A I. We've taken it one step further. We say here are the principles but how do you actually demonstrate that the principles has been adhered to? So we have a software tool kit and testing framework which we call A I verify. And that was very applicable in the context of classical A I traditional A I with generative A I. We created another project, we call it Moonshot. The idea is how do you test for the safety of A I systems with generative A I. So those are the practical ways in which we try to move forward. So it's an interesting combination of, of, as you say, guard rails and things to kind of encourage and promote innovation. You mentioned data which is a really interesting um uh component of this equation in the case of Singapore. So uh as I mentioned, when we chatted the other day, I was uh I, I spent some time trying to understand how a country uh like Singapore was, you know, 6 million people, less uh very small, limited land. Um what it does to get access to lots of data. Uh You will be familiar with Kai Fu Lee who speaks often at our events. He's got this book that argues that uh we're heading into this age of A I superpowers that are the the two big superpowers will be the US and China and they will be superpowers because they have access to the new oil of the Digital Age, which is data. So how does a small city state like Singapore compete in the age of A I superpowers and big data? So this point about the size of our population and the availability of data has been talked about before. Uh But I think you can look at it from a different perspective if you consider the size of our GDP and use it as an indication of the breadth and depth of activities that are taking place in Singapore. And that every single one of those activities generates a data point. Then actually maybe the data is not as small as we think it is, right? And in fact, there are also ways in which the training of A I models need not necessarily depend on a very large amount of data or the data being directly available to you. There are techniques in privacy enhancing technologies that will allow for example, Federated learning to take place. You may not be in possession of the data, but it doesn't prevent you from being able to extract the learning from that data. So investments in privacy enhancing technologies is one of the ways in which we can complement the need for data that also requires us to push ahead on things like cross border data flows, making it easy for companies that may have a multinational presence to be able to within their own organizations, be able to move data around. So those are the parallel efforts that we are doing in order to try and deal with the question of data. So my, my article is in the next issue of Fortune Magazine which will come out soon. I just went on the uh on the website today. But one of the things that uh I mentioned in there is that Singapore has been very proactive in thinking about how to use uh some of the assets that are unique that it does have to uh compensate for the fact that he doesn't have a huge population. Uh And, and uh there's the airport, which is one of the busiest airports in the world, the uh container port now, the second busiest container port uh in the world. You've got some of the the world's biggest banks uh right here. And then as you mentioned, there are all these multinational companies that are, that are coming in. So it makes for a very interesting ecosystem where there's a lot of technological sophistication and data, even though the population might be limited, the concept is very similar. Um whether it is for the aviation hub or the maritime center or for financial services, we've sort of position Singapore in the flow. You are in the flow of capital, you are in the flow of goods, you are in the flow of ideas, you are in the flow of people. And similarly, you can also be in the flow of data. That's how we're thinking about it. One of the bottlenecks on that, that's been a bit of a challenge for Singapore has of course been data centers and I wanted to ask you about that very quickly. Singapore has uh 70 plus data centers. That's an enormous number for its size. And yet this is a place that is resource constrained in many ways, land is scarce energy is expensive, there's no renewable energy to speak of and you know, it's hot and so running a data center in Singapore can be a daunting proposition. Uh Singapore had a moratorium uh that was imposed in 2019 because of concerns about uh data centers just consuming too much energy. Uh That's being lifted. There's a new uh blueprint in place. Uh And where do you see that going? Can Singapore continue to add data centers or will it have to start parking things next door in Johor? I'm really glad you brought up the fact that we're very hot. We can only ever give you a warm welcome in Singapore. You have to, you remember that, but let's go back to the question of data centers. It's not just the number of data centers that matter, it's the combined capacity. And if you look at our data center capacity relative to the size of our GDP, and if you compare it to say Japan or if you compare it to China, actually, we have way more. If you take Japan, for example, it has got a population that is maybe 20 times the size of Singapore GDP, maybe the 10 times the size of Singapore. But actually, if you look at the data center capacity, I don't think it is more than a 1.5 times more than Singapore. So you do that comparison across many other jurisdictions and you come to the conclusion that actually in Singapore, you already have one of the densest data center capacity, but it doesn't mean that we don't want to accommodate more growth because we do accept the fact that with A I being a more prominent technology undergirding our entire economy, you will certainly have additional demands being placed on data centers, more workloads need to be hosted in Singapore just so that the inferences can be done in the time that they need to be done. So some growth is going to be helpful. The question is how do we do it whilst also being able to fulfill our commitments to the net zero pathway as well as being responsible in sustainability. Tropical DC standards is one of them. So we introduce a new set of standards. If you're operating a data center in a tropical climate, do you need to operate it at the temperature? That is so low or actually even with one degree higher in temperature? You're OK. How do you do that? And then a more sustainable way to the future is to move towards greener diseases. This is either the operations, becoming more energy efficient or the source of energy that is used to power. The data centers will have to become greener. So those two pathways we think will give us some room as to how much it also depends on how quickly the technology evolves, actually, maybe very quickly if I could about um the the prospect for regional collaboration, as you sort of think about how to uh you know, project your, your weight in in terms of data. And, and A I uh Singapore is one of the most advanced uh A I adopters in this region, if not the most. Um But yet there's some data that has to be sovereign, has to stay on for how do you see the scope of uh you know, possibilities for collaboration with the rest of Southeast Asia and particularly uh Malaysia very much so because um ASEAN was one of the first to have a data management framework. It's been around for a few years. And on top of that data management framework, we've been able to put together a set of legal requirements that we can meet on both sides in order to facilitate the movement of data across the two jurisdictions. And this is not just between Singapore and Malaysia, it is pan a young. Um I would also say that there is a lot of interest and commitment to ensure that progressively we move towards more adherence to international standards in cross border data flows. And so not just Singapore, but several other countries are members of the US led global cross border privacy rules that was introduced some years ago. So it's not just a it's not just regional, it's not just trying to be really, really global and have a certain kind of multiple, multiple camps very much. So I think my colleagues and I amongst the Aan digital Ministers all recognize the importance of water. I would just the importance of data. What am I saying? What is of course also I would just like to say something in response to what Kai Fu has said about data being the new oil. One small problem with describing data as a new oil is that it gives the impression that data depletes that after you because once oil is used, you know, you can't reuse it. Data is not like that data can be reused many times over, it can be recombined and data is actually more useful when it is being reused in many different contexts. So when we think of data as a new oil, it is very valuable and that's what makes it look like the new oil, but it doesn't deplete, like oil will deplete. So we have to think of data in a different way. We do want to protect it are legitimate occasions where the data may be security sensitive. No country would want to share them. There will be data that will be enterprise, business sensitive and no right thinking business owner would want to share it and you need to find ways to protect them. But beyond that, there are a lot of benefits to being able to share the data and there are also increasingly more secure ways of doing so well. It's fascinating to see all the different things that Singapore is doing as I sort of mentioned in the article, uh Singapore is a great case study for other uh small and medium sized countries that are looking to kind of refine their strategy and to maximize the resources available to them. Uh Minister C Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Appreciate it, really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you very much.