The cost of intelligence is diminishing towards zero.

Tody we’re launching Sido Research, an applied AI research and deployment non-profit, aimed at servicing local Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and family businesses. 

We are built on two pillars:

1. Accelerating safe AI adoption and transformation within HK’s economy, both on a personal and organizational efficiency. 

2. Making sense of AI in Hong Kong

   
   

We take Palantir’s forward deployed engineering approach, working and building software alongside businesses to accelerate transformation. Our conviction is that the bulk of AI’s benefit will come in the deployed application layer.

With humble beginnings as a small trading port and fishing village, Hong Kong has seen various stages of growth to where it is today: the global financial hub. Hong Kong is home to the headquarters of many global financial institutions and locally-established large conglomerates. Multi-national corporations find Hong Kong to be a favorable environment in the East to conduct business, and so do other smaller business owners.

On SMEs

Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in Hong Kong’s flourishing economy. SMEs in Hong Kong account for 98% of all enterprises, 50% of the GDP, and employ over 44% of the labor force (excluding civil services). The key role of SMEs is well-recognized by the Hong Kong government, who continually support and nurture these businesses through funding schemes, business advisory support, and exposure opportunities in international exhibitions.

HK’s economy remains dominated by the the service sector (93.5%)*, and we’re seeing a rise in AI-enabled 

We’re targeting niche verticals. From traditional service businesses, manufacturing, mom-and-pop retail and 

The AI revolution and its effects

The introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of showcasing intelligence, decision-making, and reasoning had led to a stark paradigm shift in the way existing businesses operate their workflows and paved the way for many AI-powered startups to emerge into the market. We’re seeing some sort of AI augmentation in entire workflows and job roles making it easier, faster, and cheaper to drive output and growth. With this new field of innovation, we see AI frontier labs producing better and better reasoning models that make previous ones obsolete; we see more control and safety assurance of AI models with cutting-edge alignment and mechanistic interpretability research; we see augmentation (and even end-to-end automation) of entire workflows in the general population’s daily lives and work. 

However, Hong Kong’s ecosystem of SMEs are falling behind in their adoption of AI into their existing workflows. SMEs have traditionally been run for decades across several generations, keeping the same workflows and technological adoption. After all, why fix something that isn’t perceived as broken? We observe many such cases where operations that could very easily be augmented to be done with less effort and time cost. The lack of adoption of AI tools and workflows is exactly why Sido Research exists today.