2024 milestones: February

Tech-related highlights for February 2024 include:

- AI Singapore's SEA-LION, a family of large language models (LLMs) that is specifically pretrained and tuned for Southeast Asian languages and cultures, was available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. 

- The Asia-Pacific Data Centre Association (APDCA) announced its newly-elected Chair of the Board, Jeremy Deutsch, President, Asia-Pacific, Equinix, will lead APDCA for two years. Serene Nah, MD and Head of Asia Pacific, Digital Realty was elected as Vice Chair. Board members include Damon Reid, Executive Group Director, Asia-Pacific at Global Switch; Jonathan King, Group Chief Strategy and Investment Officer, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres; Rangu Salgame, Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder of the Princeton Digital Group; Raymond Tong, President, APAC, Vantage Data Centers; Robin Khuda, Founder and CEO, AirTrunk; and Shekhar Sharma, CEO of NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India and NTT Communications India.

- Cryptocurrency Bitcoin hits US$1 T market capitalisation, the first time it has done so since 2021.

- Google announced that users can generate images in its Bard conversational AI technology in most countries, and use Gemini Pro in any language, country and territory Bard currently supports. Gemini Pro offers more advanced reasoning, planning, and understanding.

- OpenAI introduced its text-to-video AI model, Sora.

The company also said it is testing persistence of memory for ChatGPT. "You’re in control of ChatGPT’s memory. You can explicitly tell it to remember something, ask it what it remembers, and tell it to forget conversationally or through settings. You can also turn it off entirely," the company said in the announcement.

- Palo Alto Networks introduced a platformisation strategy with offers that include initial periods at no cost for selected customers.

- Rakuten Symphony launched Rakuten Drive, a file storage cloud service, in Japan.

- Singapore announced a new National Cybersecurity Command Centre as well as investments in AI.

Singapore further announced that it only remains for a financial plan to be established before setting up an ASEAN Regional Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). The ASEAN Regional CERT will enable stronger regional cybersecurity incident response coordination and critical information infrastructure (CII) protection cooperation, including for cross-border CII such as banking and finance, communications, aviation and maritime.

- Singtel, together with strategic partners Ericsson and Samsung, announced the world’s first live implementation of app-based network slicing.

- StarHub signed a research collaboration agreement with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) to conduct joint trials and demonstrations of Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) applications in the Future Communications Connectivity Lab (FCCLab).

- U Mobile, the mobile and digital services provider, and ZTE Corporation, a global provider of information and communication technology solutions, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enhance collaboration in 5G and 5G Advanced technology, containerisation and autonomous network initiatives, as well as 5G adoption for businesses.

Source: Ubisoft. A scene from the Skull and Bones game.

- Ubisoft released Singapore-made Skull and Bones on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, and PC via Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store. The game was in development for over a decade.