Singapore has launched a S$70 million initiative to develop a National Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) programme (NMLP).
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) is partnering with AI Singapore (AISG) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in this effort and the funding will be provided by the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF).
This will be Southeast Asia’s first regional LLM.
According to IMDA, this programme marks a “significant leap forward” in building the next bounds of AI capabilities for Singapore and the region.
In line with the Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2025 plan, the two-year national-level initiative will also support Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 (NAIS 2.0), which was launched by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Lawrence Wong, at the Singapore Conference for AI.
The NAIS 2.0 aims to nurture Singapore as a global leader in AI solutions by 2030 by developing and deploying scalable, impactful AI solutions in key sectors of high value and relevance to citizens and businesses.
According to IMDA, the NMLP will help to build skilled AI talent in Singapore by providing funding and access to high-end computing for local researchers and engineers.
It will also foster a thriving AI industry to develop LLM-enabled solutions for greater productivity and new opportunities for businesses.
Regional context
The NMLP will develop a base model with regional context that can understand Singapore and the region’s unique linguistic characteristics and multi-lingual environment.
This effort in research, engineering, governance, computing, and innovative enterprise AI use cases will develop models and use cases within the next two years, IMDA said.
The agency added that it will build on early outcomes of AISG’s recently launched SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) model, an open-sourced large language model that is more representative of Southeast Asia’s cultural contexts and linguistic nuances.
SEA-LION is designed to be relatively smaller, flexible and faster than the commonly used LLMs in the market today, IMDA said.
It represents a relatively inexpensive and efficient option for organisations, especially the many cost-sensitive and throughput–constrained enterprises in SEA, to incorporate AI into their workflows.
This project will further develop SEA-LION to 30-50 billion parameters in size, and extend SEA-LION into a multimodal speech-text model.
This will draw on A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research’s (I2R) work in speech and language research that has been applied widely in language transcription and translation supporting various agencies and companies in the private sector.
I2R’s multimodal speech-text foundation model could help identify non-verbal cues and enable SEA-LION to have a closer read of the user intent.
National effort
IMDA’s Biztech Group’s Assistant Chief Executive, Ong Chen Hui said: “This national effort underscores Singapore's commitment to become a global AI hub. Language is an essential enabler for collaboration”.
Ong added that by investing in talent and investing in large language AI models for regional languages, “we want to foster industry collaboration across borders and drive the next wave of AI innovation in Southeast Asia”.
The IMDA official noted that as technology evolves rapidly, there is a strategic need to develop sovereign capabilities in LLMs.
Singapore and the region’s local and regional cultures, values and norms differ from those of Western countries, where most large language models originate, Ong said.
A cornerstone of this initiative is the development of multimodal and localised LLMs for Singapore and the region to understand the context and values related to the diverse cultures and languages of Southeast Asia, for example, managing context-switching between languages in multilingual Singapore, Ong added.
The development of the NMLP follows from initial efforts by various government agencies to leverage and expand Singapore’s AI capabilities.
These include the launch of AISG in 2017 as the national programme in AI, A*STAR’s Centre for Frontier AI Research, as well as the Research Programme on the Governance of AI and Data Use undertaken by SMU’s Centre of AI and Data Governance.
