Crossroad Chatters: What Makes an AI Singaporean?

​Crossroad Chatters is an intimate, small group discussion, not a large audience, one way talk. Come ready to share your own perspective and hear from others in a safe, honest space.

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​National Day always brings this up in some form. Ask any group of Singaporeans what makes us us, and you will get answers that overlap in spirit but rarely in detail. Someone brings up hawker centres, someone else brings up National Service, someone else brings up a specific Singlish phrase their grandmother used to say. We are all pointing at the same thing from slightly different angles, and somehow that is exactly what being Singaporean feels like.

​Now layer AI on top of that. As AI assistants become part of daily life here, they inherit the same challenge we quietly navigate as a pluralistic society, whose version of Singapore do you build for? Can a model actually hold Singlish, our particular blend of cultures, and the small shared references that make a joke land here, or will it always default to something more generically Western?

​This is not just hypothetical either, and the local scene is already circling it from every angle: GovTech building LionGuard and RabakBench, HTX fine tuning models on local speech and lingo, IMDA putting out MERaLiON, and NUS researchers arguing that language itself is inherently cultural. All wrestling with the same underlying question of what it really means to align an AI to a culture and not just a language, and how rabak these models still are when we throw real local context at them.

​This session is a small group discussion, not a panel. Come with your own Singapore story, your own AI experience, and your honest take on whether the AI in your life actually gets us.