Singapore's Foreign Minister's Homemade AI Built Using Mini Computer

Amid the heated debates on artificial intelligence (AI) regulation among world leaders, Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, has opted for a far more concrete approach. Rather than merely discussing, he has publicly introduced a personal AI assistant that he designed and built himself to support his daily diplomatic activities. Balakrishnan refers to his virtual assistant as a “second brain” for a diplomat. Its capabilities include answering technical questions, conducting topic research, drafting speeches, and providing daily briefings. “This system has become invaluable; I wouldn’t dare turn it off!” he wrote in a Facebook post. Balakrishnan is not just a politician following technology trends. He is a former ophthalmologist who graduated from the National University of Singapore and received a Presidential Scholarship in medicine in 1980, making him someone accustomed to systematic, evidence-based thinking. This virtual assistant system is built on two open-source foundations. The first is NanoClaw, an independent AI assistant based on the Claude model by developer Gavriel Cohen, which runs locally on a Raspberry Pi and connects directly to various messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord. The Raspberry Pi itself is a mini computer made by the UK’s Raspberry Pi Foundation. The “Pi” in its name is an abbreviation for the Python programming language, which can be used to program the Raspberry Pi for various purposes. This mini computer is priced at hundreds of thousands of rupiah. In addition to being used like a desktop PC, Raspberry Pi mini computers that can run the Linux-based Raspberry OS are widely used by users as the brain for various devices such as IoT and robots. Secondly, Balakrishnan applies the “LLM Wiki” pattern proposed by former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy, as a solution to the “amnesia” problem in AI that often loses conversation context with each new session. The system works by absorbing all of Balakrishnan’s speech drafts, articles, and web clippings, then processing them into a structured knowledge graph. Every time it receives a question, the AI performs a semantic query and injects relevant facts into its response, making it smarter the more it is used. For Balakrishnan, AI is not just a policy debate topic. “Diplomats who learn to work with AI will have a significant advantage, and I believe that advantage starts now,” he concluded. The tool named Mnemon stores information in a SQLite database, which is then converted into wiki pages and can be accessed via the Obsidian app on macOS or iOS.