Southeast Asian AI Talents Gather at AWS Regional LLM League

Co-organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AI Singapore (AISG), the inaugural Regional LLM League attracted 1,300 students from higher education institutions across six countries: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

The competition kicked off in January this year, and culminated in the final round held last May, as part of the AI Student Development Conference (AISDC). Hosted by AI Singapore (AISG), the AISDC brings together industry leaders and emerging young talents in the AI field to drive innovation and shape the future of technology. The event showcased real-world AI applications, career opportunities, and leadership through a series of panel discussions, workshops, and exhibitions to inspire and equip AI talents.

One of the important goals of the Regional LLM League is to provide hands-on learning experiences in a real-world environment.

“LLM League originated from a bold idea by the fearless innovators at AWS – to gamify the refinement of LLM models and make them more engaging and accessible to everyone,” said Koo Sengmeng, Head of AI Talent Development, AI Singapore. “AI Singapore is proud to partner with AWS to bring these essential 21st century skills to life in a fun and accessible way, not just in Singapore but across Southeast Asia.”

Participating in the tournament, contestants are given Amazon SageMaker JumpStart credits to fine-tune their Llama 3B models, with the ultimate challenge: surpassing the much larger Llama 70B reference model, in the form of a multiple-choice assessment.

Through an intensive Generative AI (Gen AI) workshop led by AWS Gen-C (Gen AI Learning Community) instructors, students were exposed to key concepts in LLM model development, including data management, prompting techniques and evaluation methods, as well as agentic AI and responsible AI. In just three weeks, they created more than 5,000 models – a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of the program and the value of fine-tuning skills and strategies in AI model development.

One of the key objectives of the Regional LLM League is to provide hands-on learning in a real-world environment – the model development scenarios that contestants must solve are all simulated situations in professional AI environments. Students are also provided with the Amazon SageMaker JumpStart toolkit to train their models, test their inference capabilities, and simulate deployments, allowing them to not only develop and hone their technical skills, but also get familiar with real-world application environments.

The success of this first regional tournament has demonstrated the scalability of a community-based technology upskilling model. As an initiative of AI Spring Communities under the AWS AI Spring Singapore program, the tournament serves as a model for large-scale AI education, especially in areas with disparities in education systems and access, as well as in communities that are underserved or underrepresented in various sectors.

Lan Anh

Source: https://doanhnghiepvn.vn/tin-tuc/giao-duc/cac-nhan-tai-ai-dong-nam-a-quy-tu-tai-aws-regional-llm-league/20250710022535459