Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo

If artificial intelligence now shapes how we learn, diagnose, farm, build, and govern, then the capacity to understand and improve it cannot be confined to a handful of well funded laboratories or private platforms. It must be a public capability, taught and practiced by students across the higher education system—and, increasingly, in advanced secondary programs. The state’s role is not merely to regulate the outputs of AI but to ensure that the next generation can study, test, and remake...

If the Philippines aspires to be a producer rather than a passive consumer in the AI economy, it must treat compute, data, and connectivity as strategic infrastructure. Across Southeast Asia, peers are already moving at infrastructure scale: Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 centers shared national compute; Malaysia has partnered with Nvidia and YTL Power to set up AI supercomputing in Johor; and Indonesia is backing an Indosat–Nvidia AI center in Central Java. These are not pilots but...

On Nov. 6, I stood on the One Young World stage at ICM Messe Munich, looking out at 2,500 young leaders from 190 countries. The room fell quiet as I introduced myself in Kinaray-a, my mother tongue from Western Visayas in the Philippines. It was a short greeting, but for me it felt like bringing my whole community into a space where our language is almost never heard.