Sea to launch new AI centre to drive innovation and capability-building in Singapore
Facility could create at least 100 roles, spanning AI research, engineering and product development
[SINGAPORE] Technology company Sea announced on Monday (Apr 20) that it will establish an Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence (AI CoE) in Singapore.
At least 100 R&D and innovation-focused roles are expected to be created in the Republic over the next three years, spanning AI research, engineering and product development.
The centre will focus on both the research and business application of AI, alongside other strategic capability-building efforts.
This includes foundational AI, aimed at advancing foundation model development, evaluation frameworks and internal tooling to stay close to frontier developments in the field.
It will also focus on scalable deployment that translates R&D advances into production-ready solutions that can be sustainably rolled out at scale to enhance user experience and efficiency, among others.
Lastly, it aims to nurture a pool of AI-native talent, and experiment with new operating models enabled by AI technology.
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In a press statement, Sea chairman and chief executive Forrest Li said that the company sees AI as a “foundational capability” that supports how it builds products, operates at a global scale and creates value.
He added that such home-grown AI capabilities also contribute to the wider AI ecosystem in Singapore.
The AI CoE was launched with support from Digital Industry Singapore (DISG), a joint office by the Economic Development Board, Enterprise Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority.
“This investment by Sea strengthens our position as a global AI hub with cutting-edge capabilities in Singapore,” said Philbert Gomez, senior vice-president, executive director and head of DISG.
“The new AI CoE will create new innovation roles in areas such as AI engineering and product development, providing Singaporeans an opportunity to create AI products with a global reach.”
Developing its in-house AI models
The centre will also develop and deepen the application of Sea’s in-house AI models, including its foundation model Compass Max v3.5, a 245-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) tailored for South-east Asian languages and e-commerce contexts.
Currently, the model and its variants are integrated across the company’s e-commerce platform Shopee.
Sea noted that these models power numerous AI features on Shopee and operate with “greater responsiveness, and at a fraction of the cost of other leading commercially served LLMs”.
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