At the recent ATxSummit 2025, the flagship event of Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG), Mrs Josephine Teo, Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information, unveiled updates to Singapore’s Large Language Model – Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network (MERaLiON) – and launched the MERaLiON Consortium, a significant boost to Southeast Asia’s AI capabilities. She also announced new global initiatives and collaborations which strengthen Singapore’s AI ecosystem and accelerate responsible AI adoption, putting Singapore at the forefront of efforts to operationalise AI safety, accelerate capability development, and promote international cooperation for AI that benefits all.
Enhancements and New Industry Partnerships
MERaLiON, a large language model developed by A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I2R) and supported by IMDA, breaks new ground in regional AI capabilities with enhanced multilingual processing and emotional intelligence. The model now expertly handles Malay, Tamil, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese on top of English, Mandarin and Singlish, with advanced code-switching abilities and emotion recognition features. These improvements enable more intuitive and culturally aware AI applications in Southeast Asia, which could be applied to customer service, social service, and marketing sectors.
To accelerate adoption, IMDA and A*STAR I2R have launched the MERaLiON Consortium, a collaborative platform that brings together local and global industry players and research and development (R&D) institutions like HTX, MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), NCS, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC), Singapore, SPH Media and ST Engineering with leading technology companies like Axiom IT Solutions, BytePlus, CommonTown, DBS Bank, Grab and Microsoft Singapore. The Consortium will focus on developing practical AI applications, from multilingual customer support to health and emotional insight detection and agentic decision-making systems.
Since its initial release in December 2024, MERaLiON’s first version has garnered over 90,000 downloads globally, attracting users from corporate research labs, media service providers, startups, and academics.
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