Google Deepmind launches research lab in Singapore to better study S-E Asia’s cultural nuances

[SINGAPORE] Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Google Deepmind on Wednesday (Nov 19) launched its research lab in Singapore.

The lab’s opening is part of the group’s efforts to expand into the Asia-Pacific region. It operates other research labs in India and Japan.

Located at its Apac headquarters at Pasir Panjang, the research lab is Google Deepmind’s first in South-east Asia, and has already begun operations.

Google Deepmind is the main AI research body of Google. It made headlines back in 2016 when its AlphaGo programme defeated then world champion Lee Sedol in the strategy board game Go.

The group has more than doubled the number of employees in its Asia-Pacific team over the past year, but did not reveal headcount and investment amount figures. The new facility will seek to hire AI researchers and engineers to further improve its Gemini offerings.

“The new research lab will be focused on collaboration as Google Deepmind works directly with government, businesses, civil society and world-class academic institutions across the region,” it said.

Responding to media queries, Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer of Google DeepMind, said that the facility’s research agenda includes healthcare and education.

She added that Google DeepMind’s research team in Singapore contributed to the research and development of Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3.

Ibrahim highlighted that Google DeepMind’s presence in South-east Asia will allow it to understand cultural nuances when training and refining its large language model (LLM).

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Yolyn Ang, vice-president of Asia-Pacific business development at Google, said localising LLMs, such as Google’s Gemini, is important “because it creates and minimises the barrier to entry or interaction with AI in the first place”.

This would allow AI models to be accessible to more users, Ibrahim added.

To help understand South-east Asian nuances, Google Deepmind has collaborated with AI Singapore (AISG) to train its models using South-east Asian data.

Mark Pereira, head of partnership and strategy at AISG, said that by working together with Google Deepmind, AISG will be able to bridge the “last-mile gap” between general LLMs that have been built and bring them down to represent South-east Asia.

Looking ahead, Ibrahim said: “Our focus right now is to get the team hired, get them up and running, ensure success, and then we’ll figure out how to expand from there.”