The Riskiest Play
Everyone thinks AI is the next big thing. It’s been more than 3 years since this hype cycle started. I think that’s actually the riskiest play right now.
A much lighter week than usual.
Discussions with two associations and one technology services firm on training. Facilitating a capstone ideation workshop with international regulators going through a module I developed. A discussion on a youth development programme. An advisory board meeting for the quantitative finance programme of a US business school.
And quietly, in the margins, I finally restarted something I had set aside for too long.
And the art piece accompanying this article is the result of a week-long effort to pick up my brush.
The Portfolio and the Fear
Over the past 6 months I have been deliberate about the envelope of possibilities. My filter is simple. Anything that fulfills certain criteria gets thrown out - anything that bores, that constrains, that does not vibe or lead to new skills. I’ve landed on training for a few key associations and institutes. Some adjuncts. Some writing gigs. A new startup I am building with a collaborator. And some advisory gigs on the horizon. No single party owns me. No exclusivity. No single point of failure.
Diversified. But still fully correlated to AI.
That’s a problem for me. Most of my life in MAS has been about investment and risk management. And I’ve realized that I’m facing concentration risk. While I have reduced my counterparty risk, I‘m not diversified at all when it comes to the asset class. Everything sits in the same space - AI.
And the number of people building within this asset class scares me. And how they are building it. My bet is that many of the things being hyped up now are not going to last. Prompt engineering and the many pseudo AI engineering terms that have followed. Jumping from AI tool to AI tool and the FOMO around them. Wanting the easy AI transformation spiel, without any interest in the fundamentals.
So I started thinking about an uncorrelated asset.
How the Art Started
University of Toronto in the late 90s. Engineering undergrad. Dating a music major, I found myself wandering into galleries I would never have entered alone. Spending lots of time in the neighborhood art supply shop. Skipping classes for 3D modeling classes at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
I came back to Singapore and went deep into photography while doing national service. Learning how to set up lights in a studio. Developing my own black and white prints. My first job was at the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts. Ironically, that’s where I met many folks in the art world and realized how hard it was to make a living doing art. So I went to the MAS to do finance instead.
And stopped doing art. For around half a decade.
Then I ended up in a role I hated. Coordination work. Board secretariat. Drafting speeches. And around the same time my daughter was spending a fair number of nights in the hospital. I couldn’t sleep there. So I bought a tablet and started doing digital illustrations during those nights.
From those nights came a small practice. Prints sold at a local design shop. Commissions for magazines such as Tatler and Wallpaper. Small exhibitions. A poster for a play at Esplanade. A chapter in a Mr Kiasu comic.
Then another gap. Due to a full time PhD that consumed the same creative energy in a different form. And during that period, AI became so good at generating art that my digital illustration skills felt irrelevant
A short break between the end of the PhD and going back to work at MAS allowed me to join a watercolor community run by Ong Kim Seng for a few weeks.
The obsession kicked in again. 2024 - back at work at MAS, but a lot of watercolors in the evenings.
Then 2025. My daughter went for a transplant. And things at work became difficult in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The art stopped and waited.
Why Now
I’ve come to the conclusion that our expectations of AI have become overblown. And at a personal level I feel it. If AI takes off fully and is fully integrated and becomes as common-place as electricity, or if AI stalls - my identity grounded in AI becomes less relevant.
Something done by hand is probably the most uncorrelated thing I have. Slow. On paper. No prompt. No FOMO. Just observation and a brush and whatever is left of Singapore before it disappears. It may not take off. The world of art is brutal.
But it’s irreducibly human.