Stairway To Heaven

Last week, I met Prabhu, a programme manager, for coffee. He is also a lecturer at NUS and was pursuing his PhD at the SeSaMe Lab more than ten years ago, around the time I was doing my Final Year Project (FYP) at the database lab. Although we were in different stages of our academic journeys, our paths crossed back then, and it was great to reconnect after all these years. I reached out to him because I had been feeling anxious about what to do next with my AI storytelling platform, Kakis.ai . Recently, it received some public attention through its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud and HeritageSG in an AI storytelling video challenge . While that was encouraging, it also made me confront some uncomfortable questions. AI is an incredibly competitive space. New models and products emerge almost daily, particularly from the U.S. and China, where many of the frontier AI models are developed. I found myself wondering: Should I continue investing my time and energy into this? Can I realisti...

Eight years ago, my then-girlfriend and I made our first World Cup bet. It was 2018, a teenager named Mbappé was tearing through his first World Cup, and we were still in our dating days — the kind of couple who turns everything into a small competition. We each picked a champion, shook hands, and a tradition was born. Four years later, in 2022, we did it again — this time with a one-year-old on our laps who contributed mostly by chewing on the remote. And now, in 2026, the game has grown into a full five-person family draft, with rules, priorities, and one very opinionated five-year-old. The rules Simple, but sacred: everyone picks before the tournament starts, picks are made in priority order, and — most importantly — you cannot pick a team someone else already took . First come, first served. The stakes: bragging rights, and a "potential award" that Grandma takes very, very seriously. Pick #1: The five-year-old oracle Our son got first priority — house rules favor the youn...