‘Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest’: Vivian Balakrishnan to headline AI Engineer SG after posting his personal AI system

SINGAPORE: It was announced on May 10 (Sunday) that Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan will be one of the speakers to open AI Engineer Singapore later this week. AI Engineer SG’s Agrim Singh posted on X, “Where in the world can you find a senior government leader with a personal AI stack published on GitHub? How many would be willing to talk about it in a room full of builders?”

Dr Balakrishnan, a physician by training who served as Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative for several years, took many by surprise when he posted about a technical write-up of his personal AI system on Facebook.

He wrote that he had been tinkering with what he thought of “as a ‘second brain’ for a diplomat, using two open-source building blocks: NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen and the LLM Wiki pattern by Andrej Karpathy.

NanoClaw, he explained, hosts Claude-based agents that connect to messaging channels. The LLM Wiki pattern, meanwhile, is a personal knowledge management system that builds and maintains a structured, interlinked wiki from notes, papers, and PDFs.

This “second brain,” the minister added, “answers every question, researches topics, provides daily updates, drafts speeches, and condenses information. It has become invaluable — I don’t dare switch it off! 

The diplomat who learns to work with AI will have a meaningful edge. I think that edge is now.”

Shortly afterwards, the founder of PundiXLabs noted that

 “Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest peak,” and jokingly warned Singapore’s developers that the Foreign Minister was coming for their jobs.

Mr Cohen also quickly took notice of the minister’s posting, marvelling that Dr Balakrishnan did not gatekeep the architecture of his “second brain,” but posted it on GitHub. Sharing the tech was the significance of the minister’s achievement, as the tech itself would grow obsolete in a matter of months, he added.

AI Engineer Singapore’s Sherry Jiang wrote that after Dr Balakrishnan’s post, “the global AI community noticed because it reflected something bigger: a willingness to engage with these systems directly, publicly, and practically.”

She added that the minister will share his experiences with working with open-source AI tools as well as reflections on how AI could change global dynamics, along with the way people “work, think, and manage information.”

“Singapore has become the place where that kind of engagement happens seriously,” she added.

“MY HOME COUNTRY’S MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS (equiv to Secretary of State) IS A HUGE NANOCLAW FAN (check  @VivianBala, that’s really him, not an intern) AND WILL BE KEYNOTING @AIDOTENGINEER SINGAPORE (with NanoClaw creator @Gavriel_Cohen right after) NEXT WEEK

Use cases like his are what I have been hoping to promote with the international AIE partnerships, and  @agrimsingh and @SherryYanJiang crushed it with this one,” read an enthusiastic X post. /TISG

Read also: S$7 billion investment reflects Microsoft’s confidence in Singapore as a global digital leader