SINGAPORE: When Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan opened last weekend’s AI Engineer Singapore, he shared how he built a personal AI assistant that has helped him tremendously at work but underlined that personal understanding and accountability cannot be outsourced.
He also warned against becoming overly dependent on AI, saying, “We should beware of just trying to throw every problem and every step in a solution at an LLM (Large Language Model). It reminds me of the old proverb: for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Lessons from daily life
This month, the minister will be visiting 12 countries, meeting hundreds of people. This requires him to understand the economy, geography, culture, and history of the countries he is visiting, as well as to know the people he’ll meet “as individuals and not just something from a brief.”
Dr Balakrishnan described this as “a huge cognitive overload on every single diplomat” and wondered how his learning could be “turbocharged” so that all the necessary facts would be at hand when he needed them, and listed the tools he uses, which range from WhatsApp and iCloud to software such as Mnemon as Ollama, to whisper.cpp for speech recognition.
He even joked about using his agent in Parliament to answer supplementary questions, saying, “I am not sure about the legality of that, but if it happens, you know that I shared the idea with you first.”
AI’s “real payoff,” he added, happens as “ordinary people – teachers, lawyers, technicians, managers, doctors, even ministers” are empowered by these tools, which is how “real value for society and for the economy” is created, he added.
Learning by doing
Dr Balakrishnan emphasised the importance of learning by doing, saying that it’s not enough to use technology. Since the tech is now widely available, “everyone should embark on their personal experiments.”
“You cannot govern a technology that you have only been briefed on. You had better get your hands dirty, and then you understand both the potential and the limits, and the problems,” he added.
As AI is rapidly developing, the minister urged users to approach it with humility, recognising “that we are perhaps one of the most privileged generations to be living through a revolution,” but to remember that “security remains paramount.”
Ultimately, Dr Balakrishnan argued that “tools matter more than models” and added that AI needs to be accessible to all, so that everyone can create value at the ground level.
His speech may be viewed in full here. /TISG
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