AN AI ISLAND

INSIDE SINGAPORE'S QUEST TO NAVIGATE BETWEEN THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SUPERPOWERS

- CLAY CHANDLER

IN HIS 2018 BOOK, AI Superpowers, venture investor Kai-Fu Lee predicted the world would evolve into Cold War–style digital power blocs, one led by the U.S. and the other by China. The two economic giants would achieve overwhelming dominance in developing artificial intelligence models, Lee argued, because companies in those countries have more venture funding, more scientists, and, above all, far more data than those in other nations. Since AI tends toward monopoly—“better products lead to more users, those users lead to more data, and that data leads to even better products and thus more users and more data,” Lee wrote—the U.S. and China would leap out to “massive leads,” reducing other nations to digital client states.

That prophecy hasn’t daunted tiny Singapore. When it comes to AI, the Southeast Asian city-state—home to 5.6 million people crowded onto a landmass about a quarter the size of Rhode Island—punches well above its weight. In London-based Tortoise Media’s Global AI Index, which assesses AI capability in 62 countries across more than 100 different metrics, Singapore ranked third behind only the U.S. and China. The island nation is leveraging its mammoth container port and bustling airport to offset a dearth of domestic data. Its giant banks and scrappy “super app” companies like Grab and Sea are using AI and data analytics to drive regional and global growth strategies.

In many ways, Singapore offers a case study in how small and medium-size nations can keep pace in an escalating AI arms race. Its experience suggests small states might even have advantages over large ones in the Big Data era—and can be uniquely agile in unlocking AI’s power. “If you’re a small country, you need to be smart, you need to be faster, you need to be nimble,” says Oliver Tonby, senior partner in McKinsey’s Singapore office. “Singapore shows what a proactive and dynamic government can do.”