Young ASEAN Leaders Policy Initiative:
Generative AI Mentoring

Bangkok, Thailand  |  February 06, 2025
Guest Speaker





Young ASEAN Leaders Policy Initiative:
Generative AI Mentoring
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
February 6, 2025
 The Young ASEAN Leader Policy Initiative (YALPI) is an international forum initiated by students from the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University. Each year, YALPI gathers young leaders across ASEAN and beyond to discuss and share ideas on various social challenges and opportunities for regional capability enhancement under the regional framework to foster networks among ASEAN youths, promote public awareness, and contribute youth’s ideas to society. This year’s theme was on ““ASEAN’s Future as an AI Hub: Inclusive Policies for a Thriving Digital Economy”

I mentored approximately 60 university-level students from across the ASEAN regions on their policy proposals for AI integration in areas such as education and access to healthcare. One of my takeaways resonated with many delegates: not all problems actually require advanced AI algorithms to solve them. For example, last-mile delivery of medicine and food in rural Cambodia will not be improved by advancing the path-finding algorithm used in a logistics network. Path finding algorithms are actually quite mature and will not be improved by ChatGPT nor DeepSeek. The bottleneck in Cambodia and many rural areas of Southeast Asia is actually improving the underlying infrastructure, which has nothing to do with advanced AI. In this case, one might consider “leapfrogging” and deliver medicine and supplies directly via autonomous drones, which would require advanced computer vision and object detection.