Cheaper AI like China’s DeepSeek are ‘very welcome,’ says Singapore’s digital minister Josephine Teo

Companies considering the use of AI inevitably have to consider cost, Josephine Teo, Singapore’s minister for digital development and information, explained at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference on Tuesday

“From the perspective of bringing down costs, innovations such as DeepSeek are very welcome,” she said. 

DeepSeek’s AI models helped spark a trillion-dollar sell-off in U.S. financial markets earlier this year. The Chinese AI startup proved it was possible to create AI models that matched the performance of leading-edge models, while using significantly fewer resources for training. Tech shares plunged as investors reassessed whether massive capital spending in pursuit of the AI arms race was truly worth it. While U.S. Big Tech has recovered from the DeepSeek selloff, companies like Microsoft and Amazon are still reportedly reassessing their spending on data centers. 

In turn, DeepSeek sparked a surge in Chinese tech stocks, as investors tried to buy into AI developments in the world’s second-largest economy.

Teo clarified that Singapore wasn’t using DeepSeek in its own AI development plans, but pointed out it was part of a broader shift in this new technology to reflect global needs.

“We know that large language models that are trained primarily on a Western corpus, primarily on perhaps English as the language, will have difficulties being applied in the Southeast Asian context,” she explained. 

AI that’s been trained on English, and not one of Southeast Asia’s hundreds of different languages, “will perhaps not meet the requirements of Singapore as well as our neighboring countries.”

Singapore has helped to foster the Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION) project, a group of open-source large language models that are trained on a number of regional languages like Vietnamese and Malay. 

The U.S., China … and Singapore

Singaporean officials have tried to chart a middle path between Washington and Beijing, expressing a wish to not align with either side. The Southeast Asian country is a security ally of the U.S., but also maintains close cultural and economic ties to China. 

“Singapore’s consistent approach is to act in a way that meets our own interests,” Teo said. “We would certainly hope that relationships between the two giants can warm up to a much greater extent, but it’s not something that we can wish to happen, and it will happen.”

Still, Teo said Singapore can learn from both the U.S. and China when it comes to AI. For example, Teo cited AI governance as one area of cooperation with Washington.

China, on the other hand, offers examples of how AI can be used. ”We noticed that China’s industrial foundation is so broad and deep that the applications of AI could be very interesting to watch and learn from,” she said. 

And Singapore, too, will also grow AI skills at home. On Tuesday, Teo described how the country plans to expand the country’s pool of “AI practitioners” to “people who are in the professions”: lawyers, doctors, accountants, and manufacturing workers.

“They [will] acquire this facility with using AI, and then they can demonstrate how they can create more value for their organizations, “ she said.