If AI eats the world, what’s for dessert?

Welcome to The Prompt, your Monday dive into the world of AI that puts Asia front and center. From Big Tech’s power players to the region’s scrappy disruptors, we cover it all. Want full access to all our AI reporting? Subscribe to us here.

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Hello reader,

On the first day of Singapore’s SuperAI conference last week, the main stage was packed. People were standing at the back just to hear former Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans talk about whether AI will eat the world.

It’s hard to blame them. If AI is indeed feasting, someone should at least ask what’s for dessert. His framing stuck with me as I walked through the exhibition area.

Almost every major AI player seemed to be there: Mistral, Google, Alibaba, and Tencent. OpenAI and Anthropic were absent, but the message was clear: Enterprise AI is here.

Everyone looked extremely serious. The mood felt less like “Is AI eating the world?” and more like “AI is just waiting for procurement to approve lunch.”

There were a few attempts at fun. In one corner, a robot played chess against human visitors. Nearby, a small DJ stage tried its best to create a party atmosphere while most attendees politely walked past.

Perhaps that should serve as a reminder that AI often shows up in unexpected places before it arrives exactly where a keynote says it will.

In Southeast Asia, that means asking what happens when the technology collides with old software businesses, bank lending, and actual customers.

Our top AI story this week examines why the region’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies may have more breathing room than their Western counterparts. One reason is the fragmented markets, local relationships, and enterprise software in the region that still requires old-fashioned implementation work.

We also look at Anext Bank’s push into GPU financing, a reminder that AI infrastructure is increasingly becoming a lending business as well.

Meanwhile, SpaceX went public and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It seems rockets, satellites, AI infrastructure, and capital markets now belong in the same sentence. Anthropic, meanwhile, has suspended access to both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 following a US government directive blocking foreign nationals from accessing the models.

Also in this issue, I look at an effort to move AI beyond reactive chatbots and toward proactive agents as well as what it takes to make free AI less of a gimmick. Both stories came from my reporting at SuperAI in Singapore.

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