Had a really wonderful time hosting
@JeffDean,
@quocleix,
@benoitschilling and
@denny_zhou in Singapore for the
@GoogleDeepMind Gemini Singapore ๐ธ๐ฌ event last week! ๐ฅ
The event went super well imo, the vibes were on-point and an overwhelming number of people told me directly they were moved and very inspired! ๐
Moreover, the consensus amongst GDM speakers was also that the level of questions from the community were solid and reassuring that something good is going on here. Basically, signal to noise ratio was generally pretty good.
As I also said in my opening remarks, I think Singapore has a lot of raw pure talent, but today it is physically and spiritually far away from the true AI frontier for a myriad of reasons. Hence, increasing "frontier awareness" and "aura diffusion" (aka ecosystem building ๐) was something particularly high ROI (for us too!)
The way I see it is that SG is like a reasonably strong base pretrained model that hasn't been properly post-trained yet. It feels like the gears have started turn though, hopefully we'll make it happen. ๐ค
We also had a lot of fun roaming SG. Visiting gardens by the bay on day-0, having 2-michelin star "tarvar" as the finale dinner, pickleball with Jeff on top of a random building, spotting anteaters at the night safari and last but not least, chatting with senior minister Lee Hsien Loong and visiting the Istana.
Was an epic week! ๐
More details of the 3/9/2025 event in the thread below ๐