Back in 2017, when most institutional investors were still trying to figure out whether Bitcoin was a digital currency or a Ponzi scheme, Singapore’s GIC Private Limited (GIC), a massive wealth fund and one of the most secretive financial institutions on earth—was quietly hosting elegant panel discussions about artificial intelligence that now read like prophecy wrapped in Singaporean understatement.
At their annual GIC Insights gathering in 2017, a select conclave of global business luminaries that operates with the exclusivity of Davos but the discretion of a Swiss bank vault, managing partners and tech CEOs were matter-of-factly discussing how AI would “deliver insights beyond human experts” and transform entire industries through “real-time learning”—predictions that seemed audaciously futuristic in an era when Alexa could barely understand your coffee order. The prescience is almost eerie: they casually mentioned how a startup called Zymergen had developed mosquito repellent using automated labs “at a fraction of what DowDuPont would spend,” and how college dropouts at Embark had built autonomous trucking systems for under $10 million while Google and Tesla were still burning through billions—insights that proved remarkably accurate as traditional corporate giants found themselves outmaneuvered by nimble AI-native competitors. GIC did’t give the best examples as Zymergen filed for bankruptcy and Embark Trucks is no longer with us. Embark Trucks—the once-golden autonomous trucking startup that seduced Wall Street with visions of driverless freight dominating America’s highways—transformed from a $5.16 billion SPAC sensation into a cautionary tale of spectacular corporate implosion, slashing 70% of its workforce in 2023 before ultimately shuttering operations despite burning through a war chest that would make a small nation envious. The company’s theatrical 2021 public debut via Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II had all the hallmarks of peak SPAC mania: a preposterous valuation based on promises rather than profits, and a roster of supposedly sophisticated backers—including CPP Investments (Canada), trucking giant Knight-Swift Transportation, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital (a unit of Mubadala Investment Company), Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global Management—who collectively poured $614 million into what would become one of the most expensive experiments in automated hubris. The bitter irony is that Embark had been the poster child for scrappy startup innovation, the very company that GIC’s prescient 2017 analysis had celebrated as proof that “college dropouts” could outmaneuver tech titans like Google and Tesla by developing autonomous trucking systems for “less than $10 million”—a David-versus-Goliath narrative that conveniently omitted the epilogue where David would eventually require hundreds of millions in venture capital life support before succumbing to the harsh realities of regulatory hurdles, technological limitations, and the stubborn fact that teaching machines to navigate America’s chaotic roadways proved considerably more complex than PowerPoint presentations suggested.
The document’s strategic framework reads like a masterclass in institutional foresight, particularly their warning that companies couldn’t simply “wrap AI around existing data and systems” but needed fundamental transformation into “digital businesses”—advice that seems painfully obvious now but was revolutionary when most Fortune 500 companies were still treating AI as a glorified Excel upgrade. Their emphasis on tapping talent beyond traditional corporate partners, specifically name-checking emerging hubs in “Montreal, Toronto, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore,” proved mildly prescient as some of these cities became the catalysts of AI innovation that venture capitalists would later scramble to access. Perhaps most tellingly, they understood that adopting AI required “a fundamental rethink of a company’s mindset, approach and capability”—not just technological integration but cultural transformation, a distinction that separated the winners from the walking dead in the AI revolution that followed.
Seven years later, GIC’s 2017 insights read like a time capsule from a more innocent era when the biggest concern was whether AI could optimize supply chains, not whether it would eliminate entire professions or achieve artificial general intelligence. Their predictions about AI disrupting traditional industries, enabling startups to outperform established giants, and requiring fundamental business model reinvention weren’t just accurate—they were conservative, understating the revolutionary scope of transformation that would follow. While Silicon Valley venture capitalists were still debating whether machine learning was a sustainable investment thesis, Singapore’s sovereign wealth mandarins were already positioning for a future where human reasoning itself became a commodity. For GIC, this is a level of strategic prescience that explains why the Singaporean SWF has quietly become one of the most successful institutional investors of the past decade. Other SWFs had already caught on like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Norway Government Pension Fund Global.
