S'pore has 1.3 million coders, ranks 9th globally for helping AI projects: GitHub

Over 9,700 of them have contributed to solving tech issues on open source platform

- Krist Boo

Out of a population of six million in Singapore, more than 1.3 million are coding to solve tech issues.

And that number is growing among the fastest worldwide, at a rate of 28 per cent in the 12 months to September 2024, according to developer platform GitHub.

Boosted by the Government's efforts to get local workers and students trained in artificial intelligence (AI), Singapore's coding community also punched above its weight, ranking ninth globally for contributors creating code for AI projects on GitHub in the same period.

More than 9,700 coders in Singapore contributed to AI projects on the open source platform, where code is available for users to view, modify and distribute.

GitHub, in its annual Octoverse report, said: "In 2024, there was a 59 per cent surge in the number of contributions to generative-AI projects on GitHub and a 98 per cent increase in the number of projects overall - and many of those contributions came from places like India, Germany, Japan and Singapore."

The findings, based on unique GitHub users logging in from Singapore, were released at the GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco, which drew 3,000 participants on Oct 29 and 30.

At the conference, GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke and other presenters introduced new AI tools and features, including a headliner which lets developers choose which large language models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI they want to power their GitHub Copilot, the platform's AI coding assistant.

"There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them," Mr Dohmke said.