When throwing money at a problem works

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In focus

• Terence Lee on how Dubai’s tech talent surge masks deeper challenges
• A Singapore AI startup that has jumped to US$100 million in valuation with minimal revenue
• The dark side of OpenAI, as described in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI.

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Hello reader,

In tech, the notion of “throwing money at a problem” has lost luster thanks to a spate of well-funded startups going bust.

But it hasn’t faded – quite the opposite, in fact. This week, my colleague Melissa Goh reported that Dubai, through sheer force of will and a lot of oil money, is fashioning a tech hub out of nothing.

But money can’t buy some things.

Unseating Silicon Valley – with its mix of tech brainpower, intellectual dynamism, and proximity to the eager-to-spend US market – will be hard.

Dubai’s tech hub won’t replace lower-tier tech ecosystems like Singapore’s, either. Instead, it will find a niche.

AI, the hottest buzzword in the industry, is another space where money is flowing.

For example, Tech in Asia journalist Glenn Kaonang wrote about a Singapore company that went from zero to US$100 million in value within a year of launching its product. For an AI company, that’s mild.

OpenAI, for instance, made its game-changing product, ChatGPT, through brute force.

It believed that training AI models with ever-larger datasets and more computing power was key to breaking through. To that end, it persuaded Microsoft to fork out billions to pay for the cost for doing so, I learned while reading Empire of AI.

In the book, Karen Hao, the author, is critical of OpenAI’s claim that its technology will benefit the masses.

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