Filtered by: School of Computing
Anthropic's Dario Amodei called this month for the AI industry to slow its race towards ever more capable systems, and the leaders of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI backed him. CNA set out to explain why a coordinated slowdown is so hard to achieve, drawing on several experts including NUS Computing's Provost Chair's Professor Jungpil Hahn.
Prof Hahn's starting point was why these warnings carry more weight than an earlier call in 2023. Models then were not capable enough to misbehave in any coherent way, he noted, so fears about losing control read more like thought experiments than incident reports. Recent events have shifted that picture. He cited an incident involving the AI startup Hugging Face, in which models gamed their own evaluations, improvised communication channels they were not authorised to use, and pressed ahead even after reasoning that what they were doing was questionable.
"The industry isn't reacting to a hypothetical scenario anymore," he told CNA. "It's reacting to a real threat regarding the loss of control."
His sharpest concern lay elsewhere. Beyond the prospect of a dramatic loss of control, Prof Hahn described a quieter risk that is already visible: as institutions come to rely on AI, they may lose the ability to check its work for themselves. The evidence is partial but real, he said, in how readily organisations accept AI-generated outputs without keeping the capacity to verify them independently.
"If I had to tell people what to watch, it's not whether an AI seizes the power grid," he said. "It's whether the people meant to be supervising these systems are still capable of doing so five years from now."
Prof Hahn is also wary of mistaking a lull for safety. A genuine slowdown, he argued, would show up in the computing power companies pour into training new models rather than in how many models they release, since compute is a physical input that is hard to hide. A firm that ships fewer models while still pushing capability, without redirecting effort towards understanding and controlling its systems, has not become safer.
"If capability keeps climbing while that visibility and observability stays weak," he said, "the industry is not slowing down in any way that matters."
Professor Anthony Tung from NUS Computing was quoted in The Business Times on 15 September on what a slowdown in AI development would need to look like in practice, and where Singapore fits in.
The article followed an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slower pace of AI capability development, backed by third-party evaluators, common safety standards and coordination between governments. Prof Tung, who is also AI lead for urban sustainability at the NUS AI Institute, said what is currently missing is rules with teeth: there are no agreed conditions for when an AI lab should stop, or what evidence should allow it to proceed. His suggestion is that a lab release a capability only as fast as accredited independent evaluators can assess it, so that the pace is set by evaluation throughput rather than by a competitor's release schedule. He cautioned that obligations should scale with risk, as a one-size-fits-all approach risks entrenching the very frontier labs regulation is meant to restrain.
On Singapore's position, Prof Tung noted that accreditation under schemes such as AI Verify establishes that a tester is competent within a defined scope, not that an AI system is safe. He pointed to a gap in how software safety, cybersecurity and AI safety are treated as separate disciplines with separate funding and regulators, even as incidents increasingly span all three, and suggested Singapore set up an institute with a mandate across all three areas. "A slowdown on its own is not a safety policy," he said, adding that the time gained has to be invested in better evaluation, stronger safeguards and more resilient systems around AI.
NUS Computing Business Analytics alumnus Kyle Lao was featured in The Straits Times (ST) for MenSC Labs, the femtech start-up he co-founded to work with stem cells from menstrual blood for women's health.
Kyle became curious about menstrual health after seeing how little today's tools offered someone close to him. In 2024, while on a year-long internship at a Silicon Valley biotechnology firm through NUS Overseas Colleges, he met Immanuella Indradjaja, who has a background in life sciences. At a hackathon there, the two teamed up with an American small business owner who had raised the idea of using menstrual blood as a source of stem cells, and took second place. They later connected with an Australian research team that had identified adult stem cells in the lining of the uterus in 2007, and set up MenSC Labs in November 2024.
Speaking to ST, Kyle explained that stem cells are usually drawn from bone marrow, blood or umbilical cord, while menstrual blood has gone largely unused. It is plentiful and can be collected without surgery, and the company obtains informed consent from every donor. Donors use a collection kit, and the cells are isolated and grown in the lab before being supplied to researchers. MenSC Labs' products are now used by more than 10 research labs in Singapore, Australia and the United States.
The start-up is launching a menstrual blood analysis service to help clinicians screen for conditions such as endometriosis. Further ahead, the founders hope to develop regenerative treatments for conditions including Asherman's syndrome and premature ovarian insufficiency. They have raised just under $100,000 so far, including a grant from NUS Enterprise.
Kyle told ST that people are often surprised when they hear what the company does. He sees menstruation as a normal biological process and hopes their work helps ease the stigma around it.
Through Computing for Voluntary Welfare Organisations (CVWO), students at NUS Computing have built a mobile app that helps adults with autism report on their working day and get support when they need it.
Developed pro bono for the Autism Resource Centre (Singapore), Job Support Central lets adults enrolled in the Centre's Employability and Employment Centre (E2C) programme log how they are feeling at work, any difficulties they encountered and anything unexpected that came up, with reminders at 6pm and 10pm. Where the records suggest something is off over several days, a job coach is alerted to follow up, including a visit to the workplace where needed. Year 3 Computer Science student 列永忠, who worked on the app with five teammates over the summer break, told Zaobao that the hardest part was not digitising the workflow but understanding what the beneficiaries and the Centre actually needed.
The app was featured as CVWO marked its 20th anniversary on 11 September, with Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo as Guest of Honour. Speaking at the event, CVWO founder Associate Professor Ben Leong reminded students that writing software is about solving problems, not just technical skill. The Centre for Computing for Social Good and Philanthropy also received a S$1.5 million gift from Mr Keith Chua, trustee of the Mrs Lee Choon Guan Trust Fund , in support of CVWO.
This episode of Ethiroli examined the growing threat of deepfake-enabled scams, with a particular focus on elderly victims targeted through investment fraud schemes circulated on messaging platforms. The segment covered why why elderly viewers are disproportionately affected, alongside broader risks, including fake explicit content targeting younger users and fraudulent business impersonation.
Dr Prahbu Natarajan from the Department of Computer Science shared practical detection methods, including listening for audio inconsistencies when comparing suspect clips against known genuine recordings. The programme also featured a live demonstration by Associate Professor Terence Sim, who showed how convincingly a video and voice can be fabricated using a short audio sample, reinforcing the segment's message that deepfake creation now requires minimal technical skill.
Vasantham Ethiroli (2 September): S23 Ep 21 Deepfake: The New Face of Deception
Four Computers Science undergraduates from NUS Computing were featured in The Straits Times for AHMA, an AI-powered app designed to help caregivers in Singapore find support services that match their needs.
Aishwarya Goyal, Hazel Low, Abhishek Paranjape and Andrew Soon began the project at a hackathon in 2025, drawing on their own experience caring for grandparents and supporting friends through mental health difficulties. Speaking to ST, Abhishek described the gap the team chose to work on as resource navigation: Singapore's social service agencies and government schemes offer a great deal to caregivers, but many struggle to work out which options apply to them.
AHMA uses a voice interface as its primary mode of interaction, a choice the team made with older caregivers in mind. A user can speak to the app about their situation and receive encouragement along with pointers to relevant community organisations. It currently supports English, Malay and Mandarin, and the team is working on adding dialects. The text-to-speech model was trained on Aishwarya's voice so that it sounds familiar to Singaporean users.
The students have been gathering feedback from caregivers, including at a recent session run by Mindfull Community, a non-profit that supports caregivers and families of people with mental health conditions. Hazel told ST that co-creating with caregivers is central to how the team works. Mindfull's deputy head of partnerships, Samantha Foo, said the sessions were valuable for both sides, and that the organisation intends to review the app once a working version is ready.
The team plans to launch a working product in the coming months.
