Singapore's AI large language model Sea-Lion to offer more features

More companies are tapping the model, which can recognise 13 languages to date

- Krist Boo

Singapore's home-grown large language model (LLM), Sea-Lion, is steadily gaining traction, with some 235,000 downloads so far, bolstered by adoption by large companies such as GoTo Group in Indonesia.

After releasing its latest model with "reasoning" capabilities on April 15, its researchers at AI Singapore told The Straits Times that they plan to add voice recognition later in 2025, followed by other modalities such as visual recognition.

The new features are expected to enhance the model's usability in a region rich in spoken and unwritten languages. The model currently recognises 13 languages, including Javanese, Sudanese, Malay, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese, as well as English and Chinese.

Sea-Lion is already tapped by some businesses for its language features, with GoTo among the first enterprises to adopt Sea-Lion in February 2024 as a base to build its own artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Its chief data officer, Mr Ofir Shalev, noted: "Training a model from scratch is often prohibitively expensive. So like many in the industry, we adopted a continuous pre-training approach — building on an existing model as the starting point."

GoTo's Sahabat-AI model is now benchmarked as more accurate in reading and interpreting Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese and Sundanese than other models of similar size, according to Mr Shalev.

The $70 million Sea-Lion initiative to build an open-source LLM that reflects the native characteristics of South-east Asia was publicly launched in December 2023.

It is funded by the National Research Foundation and backed by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and Agency for Science, Technology and Research.