Remarks by Minister Josephine Teo at Foreign Policy’s Tech & AI Forum @ UNGA81

Moderator Rishi Iyengar, Technology Reporter, Foreign Policy: There's a lot of conversation around AI right now. Every country is taking their own approach. There are some universal truths, but each country is approaching it its own way. I'm wondering if you can lay out Singapore's approach to AI, how Singapore thinks about the technology as a whole and how Singapore uses the technology.

Minister Josephine Teo: That's a great question to start. It's fair to say that AI is not entirely new. Our own experimentation with AI probably took on a different pace around 2018 – this was before COVID. At the time, it was still quite modest. We identified some sectors where AI projects should be pursued as a way of experimenting with how we use the technology. But most importantly, even before we came up with a National AI Strategy, we came up with an AI governance framework. This went on for a while, and then COVID hit. Coming out of COVID, it also occurred to us that the technology was maturing, particularly around late 2022 and early 2023. The big pivot towards generative AI created a great sense of urgency and momentum, and also, a great sense of opportunity. So we decided to refresh our National AI Strategy.