Winning the AI Race Without Building an OpenAI, Say Top Singapore Researchers

Singapore does not need to build the next OpenAI to lead in artificial intelligence, argue two of the country's top AI researchers. In a detailed essay for ThinkChina, Laurence Liew, director of AI innovation at AI Singapore, and Willie Shi, associate faculty at SUSS, lay out the case that the real contest of the AI age is not confined to the laboratory.

For three years, the global AI narrative has centred on a single race: who can train the most powerful model. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. China has DeepSeek, Alibaba and ByteDance. But the authors argue that some institutions that own advanced models have not seen the productivity gains they expected, while some economies that build no foundation models at all are turning AI into practical capability at speed. The real differentiator, they write, is what they call a country's 'AI operating system' — the institutional infrastructure that allows AI to be applied widely and reliably: digital infrastructure, talent training systems, regulatory frameworks, industry standards and mechanisms of social trust.

Singapore's position, seen through this lens, is more favourable than it looks. The country is a highly institutionalised society with clear processes, a mature culture of compliance and a strong capacity to execute. Its economy is already deeply digitalised — digital identity, electronic payments and data infrastructure were laid down years ago, lowering the most common obstacle to AI adoption. The authors point to the upcoming AI Governance Testing framework and the Model AI Governance Framework for Generative AI as evidence that Singapore is building the institutional scaffolding that makes AI work at scale.

The essay also highlights Singapore's unique advantage in being small enough to coordinate across government, industry and academia. The AI Verify Foundation, the National AI Strategy and partnerships with major tech firms all feed into a cohesive national approach. The authors argue that the gap between nations may come to rest not on who owns the most GPUs, but on who has the most mature AI operating system — and that Singapore is quietly building one of the most capable in the world.

Why it matters for Singapore: This framing reframes Singapore's AI strategy from a perceived weakness — no homegrown foundation model — into a structural advantage. If the authors are right, the countries that succeed in AI will be those that can integrate the technology into real institutional workflows, not those with the flashiest labs. For a small, highly organised city-state with deep digital infrastructure, that is a race Singapore can win.