A new non-profit called AI Apex Asia held its first conference on 5 June 2024 at Lazada One in Singapore, under the theme The Asia Advantage, and used it to argue that the region's manufacturing base and software talent leave it well placed in artificial intelligence. The organisers say more than a hundred guests attended.

The line-up mixed policy figures with founders: Lee Yi Shyan, a former senior minister of state, and Inderjit Singh, a former member of parliament, alongside Emad Mostaque, who founded Stability AI, and Laurence Liew, a director at AI Singapore, the national programme.

The claim, and the evidence behind it

Singh made the case most directly, noting that Asia holds roughly half of global manufacturing output and about a quarter of the world's blockchain startups, and arguing the region can turn that into an AI advantage. Mostaque pressed the opposite kind of point, urging that models and data stay open so the technology serves more than a narrow group. Liew predicted that within a year most small and medium-sized businesses in Singapore would use AI to improve everyday operations, a forecast the city-state's own agency will be measured against.

Conferences like this are where a region argues with itself about its place, and the argument is easy to make and hard to prove. The attendance figure and the quotations are the organiser's own, and every speaker on the programme had a reason to be optimistic about Asia. The panels on robotics, Web3 and financing covered familiar ground.

What a first conference cannot settle is whether it will exist in five years to report progress, or to relaunch the same case, which is the test every new industry forum sets itself and rarely meets.