Launch of the Global Institute of Finance, Technology, and Society (GIFTS)

On 30 May 2026, NTU launched the Global Institute of Finance, Technology, and Society (GIFTS), a new platform that convenes academia, industry, and government to address the profound questions that artificial intelligence now poses for our society. Professor Lin William Cong, President's Chair Professor at NTU, serves as the founding director of GIFTS, which will focus on the frontier questions that arise where artificial intelligence, financial markets, institutions, and society meet, with the aim of building a research platform of international standing. Guest-of-Honour Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information, 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences Professor Thomas Sargent, scholars and valued guests participated in the event.  

GIFTS launch speech and research initiatives by Professor Will Cong  

Professor Lin William Cong, the institute's director and President's Chair Professor of Finance, Computing and Data Science at NTU, opened the event by explaining the mission of GIFTS. The institute aims to bring together researchers from world-leading institutions such as Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Oxford to work on interdisciplinary topics across economics, computer science, and law, etc.  

Cong noted that technology does not shape society on its own. The direction it takes also depends on human values, institutions, incentives, and public purposes. One of the institute's central tasks is to study how human choices interact with rapid technological change. Singapore, he added, is an ideal place for establishing the new institute. It is a financial hub at the centre of the Asia-Pacific, and the authorities take innovation and governance equally seriously. Here, the institute can contribute to AI development through rigorous research in economic, business, and social science, building capabilities that matter for resilience, security, and inclusion. 

As an interdisciplinary institute, GIFTS will collaborate with faculty across various fields, including data science, computer science, economics, finance, applied mathematics, and law, to advance research ability and infrastructure development. The institute will focus on promoting three directions: 

First, GIFTS will conduct research into how AI, data, digital platforms, and financial technologies are transforming markets and society, connecting questions in business and the social sciences with computing and data science in areas such as digital media, big data infrastructure, privacy-preserving computation, and agentic and on-chain economies. It will also run academic conferences and educational programs, including joint PhD pathways in business research and AI, to support collaboration and talent development. 

Second, GIFTS will work closely with industry leaders and policymakers to translate research into practice and public value. The institute will convene roundtables, produce policy white papers, and incubate applied-research and entrepreneurship projects, supporting work on inclusive finance, AI ethics and safety, and technology-powered wealth management.  

Third, GIFTS is designed as a global platform. With more than 40 world-renowned research and industry fellows and advisers, and as the headquarters of the AI, Digital Economics and Financial Technology (ADEFT) network, it will coordinate international research collaborations, conferences, visiting programs, and student exchanges with leading institutions around the world. 

GIFTS launched with two research initiatives, Economic World Models and Global InferenceNet. Economic World Models Initiative explores a new generation of virtual simulations of economies, markets, organisations, and digital ecosystems. Much as digital twins help engineers and city planners test physical systems, the initiative aims to create disciplined digital laboratories for business and policy decisions. They can simulate how firms, households, investors, regulators, and AI agents interact under scenarios such as market stress and shocks, helping to reveal how people and AI interact, how markets and institutions respond, and how risks may emerge before decisions are put into practice. The second, the Global InferenceNet Initiative, trains AI models and agents for advanced research across social and information sciences. Early benchmarking suggests that today's large language models are not yet able to perform professional-level economic research reliably, which makes InferenceNet a useful benchmark for measuring progress, improving reproducibility, and training both humans and AI agents. Together with the Economic World Models Initiative, InferenceNet forms part of the broader GIFTS agenda to understand, train, align, and deploy AI agents safely and productively for research, industry, and society. 

Finally, leading scholars in the mathematical, statistical, and economic sciences, Bengt Holmström, Daron Acemoglu, James Poterba, Jianqing Fan, Wei Jiang, and Shing-Tung Yau, congratulated GIFTS on its launch via video message. They expressed hope that the institute would advance work on financial technology, AI, digital markets and responsible innovation while training a new generation of scholars and said they looked forward to collaborating globally on these questions. 

Keynote address by Minister Josephine Teo 

Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information, congratulated NBS on its 30th anniversary and delivered a speech for the new institute. 

Minister Teo highlighted, "AI has the potential to expand the breadth and depth of our finance hub, strengthen financial resilience, and tackle increasingly sophisticated financial crime. These ambitions are important not just for Singapore, but for the world."  

"Finance is a heavily regulated industry and is already familiar with good as well as bad governance. But AI has changed the tempo. Credit assessments, insurance underwriting, fraud detection – these are already being done with AI, and at a speed and scale that governance needs to match," she added. 

"This is where we believe GIFTS has a role to play. GIFTS will deepen research at the intersection of AI, business, finance, and society, and bridge collaboration between academia, industry, and the government."  

Click here to read the full keynote address by Minister Josephine Teo. 

Keynote address on “Rational Expectations, Robust Decision-Making, and Economic Policy” by Professor Thomas Sargent

In his keynote, 2011 Nobel Laureate Thomas Sargent explored how AI transforms decision-making under uncertainty. He described intelligence as the ability to recognise patterns from data, compress information, generalise across contexts, and act on those insights. Artificial intelligence, in this view, aims to replicate these capabilities in machines. Sargent noted a central paradox of modern AI: machines excel in domains traditionally associated with human expertise. He attributed this success to the convergence of advances across statistics, economics, computer science, and physics, which together established the foundations of contemporary AI. 

Sargent then distinguished between two stages of scientific modelling. The first stage focuses on identifying empirical regularities in data, exemplified by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. These laws provide accurate descriptions but offer limited insight into the mechanisms that generate the observed patterns. The second stage seeks the underlying structure behind those regularities. Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, explained why Kepler’s laws hold and enabled predictions beyond the original observations. According to Sargent, much of today’s AI remains highly effective at the first task, while the deeper scientific challenge lies in advancing toward the second: uncovering the latent mechanisms that generate data and support robust out-of-sample generalisation. 

Sargent then examined the distinction between risk, uncertainty, and model ambiguity. Building on Frank Knight’s framework, he defined risk as randomness governed by a known probability model, while uncertainty arises when the model itself is not fully trusted. He emphasised that all quantitative models are approximations and therefore subject to model uncertainty. Drawing on his work with Lars Peter Hansen, Sargent distinguished among risk, ambiguity, misspecification, and structured ambiguity, each reflecting a different degree of confidence in the underlying model. He argued that the rational-expectations framework represents an extreme benchmark, assuming a common model shared by all agents. While this assumption enhances tractability, it suppresses heterogeneity in beliefs and leaves little room for model error. 

Sargent concluded by advocating a scientific approach to modelling that explicitly acknowledges uncertainty. Echoing the statistician’s maxim that “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” he argued that models should be viewed as provisional approximations rather than literal descriptions of reality. Scientific progress occurs when evidence reveals a model’s limitations and motivates the development of a more general and robust successor. He illustrated this process through the progression from Kepler to Newton and from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s relativity. In both science and AI, Sargent suggested, advances arise from systematically confronting model uncertainty and using it to guide the construction of better models. 

Prepared by Xiaoyu Chen and Yichen Guo

The Global Institute of Finance, Technology, and Society (GIFTS) is a new research institute at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It studies the most consequential challenges where finance, technology and society meet, looking at how firms, households, investors, regulators and AI agents interact under market stress, new regulations and other shocks. By convening scholars and practitioners, building interdisciplinary research infrastructure, and launching thematic initiatives and labs, GIFTS aims to make NTU the leading Asia-based global platform for research, education and policy engagement in this field.