IMDA
enterprises can design software to reduce energy consumption and, in the area of AI, tips on how we can rightsize the different AI models to fit a specific use case.”
The rightsize principle has particular commercial relevance. Lawrence points to Gen AI as an area where enterprise decisions frequently carry hidden environmental and financial costs:“ Enterprises can unlock greater value by matching AI models to their specific use cases. A good way would be to look at the specific use cases they have in store and then consider using much smaller language models and fine-tuning them on proprietary enterprise data. When they use a much smaller model fine-tuned on their data sets, the total cost will be a lot lower than using just the frontier models and the accuracy could even be better.”
IMDA has also aligned its approach with international frameworks. The authority adopted the Green Software Foundation’ s Software Carbon Intensity specifications, enabling organisations to identify inefficiencies and baseline their carbon footprint across digital operations. Lawrence describes the approach as one of leading by example: IMDA’ s own engineers are asked to implement green techniques within the software development process and the authority works directly with data centres to combine green software recommendations with operational changes at the infrastructure level.
“Innovation doesn’ t happen in a vacuum”
Dr Clifton Phua Director of Labs IMDA
Rapid prototyping as national infrastructure strategy Where Lawrence focuses on sustainable adoption, Dr Clifton Phua, Director of Labs at IMDA, approaches the authority’ s mandate from a slightly different angle: moving frontier technologies from research concept to deployable reality as rapidly as possible.
“ At our Labs, my team operates like a tech SWAT team,” Clifton says.“ We get under the hood of frontier technologies from first principles and rapidly prototype them. Instead of just studying quantum computing or embodied AI, we actually build solutions that tackle real-world business problems today
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