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Published: Jul 08, 2025

scaling Southeast Asia's AI advantage


SEA-LION is Singapore’s home-grown large language model (LLM), built to reflect Southeast Asia’s unique linguistic and cultural complexity. As the model gains traction across the region, NCS is playing a critical role in testing and extending its enterprise potential with deployments in multilingual legal, compliance and customer experience use cases that demand both local fluency and deep integration into business systems.
 

Key takeaways

  • SEA-LION is an open-source LLM developed in Singapore to support Southeast Asian languages and contexts.
  • NCS is piloting SEA-LION for high-impact enterprise applications, such as multilingual document translation and regulatory change detection.
  • The model supports 13 languages and shows strong performance in regional benchmarks.
  • NCS brings value through systems integration, workflow design, cost-performance evaluation and security.
  • The collaboration demonstrates how public-private partnerships can scale AI responsibly in a diverse region.
     

Building an LLM for Southeast Asia

SEA-LION was launched to address a long-standing gap in mainstream AI models: most lack accuracy or cultural relevance when applied to Southeast Asian languages, dialects and formats. Funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation and backed by leading tech agencies, SEA-LION recognises 13 languages. It is steadily evolving, with new features like voice recognition and visual understanding on the roadmap.

With over 235,000 downloads and enterprise adoption by GoTo Group and others, SEA-LION is quickly becoming a foundation model for the region.
 

What NCS brought to the table

While SEA-LION was designed with openness and inclusivity in mind, NCS’s involvement has centred on making it enterprise-ready. That means focusing on real-world considerations like:

  • Interoperability 
    Ensuring SEA-LION integrates with existing enterprise systems.
  • Security posture
    Evaluating how the model performs within regulated environments.
  • Workflow integration
    Embedding the model into customer engagement, compliance tracking and internal knowledge management.
  • Cost-performance optimisation 
    Using the model selectively and activating hybrid reasoning only when needed.

NCS is currently testing SEA-LION’s ability to handle multilingual legal documents, cross-border compliance analysis and complex content unification across regional teams.
 

“We are deeply interested in how the model performs as part of a larger system. Its role in insight extraction, document classification and voice interaction shows real promise.”

Ying Shaowei
Chief Scientist, NCS
 

Public and private sector impact

The SEA-LION model is part of a broader ecosystem that includes tools like SEA-Helm (a region-specific AI benchmark developed with Stanford) and interactive platforms like Playground and Telegram bots to test and deploy the model.

The value of the NCS-AI Singapore collaboration lies both in what SEA-LION is and how it can be used not just by governments but by businesses operating across diverse customer bases, regulatory environments and cultural contexts.

Summary

SEA-LION represents the next frontier of regional AI: open multilingual, and built with Southeast Asia in mind. NCS brings the enterprise perspective, proving how models like SEA-LION can be tested, tuned and deployed where it counts: in live environments, across borders and at scale.


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