Aisha Down
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In Singapore, a government-funded artificial intelligence model can converse in 11 languages, from Bahasa Indonesia to Lao. In Malaysia, ILMUchat, built by a local construction conglomerate, boasts that it “knows which Georgetown you’re referring to” – that is, the capital of Penang and not the private university in the US. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s Apertus, unveiled in September, understands when to use the Swiss German “ss” and not the German-language character “ß”.
Around the world, language models like these are part of an AI arms race worth hundreds of billions of dollars mostly driven by a few powerful companies in the US and China. As giants such as OpenAI, Meta and Alibaba plough vast sums into developing increasingly powerful models, middle powers and developing countries are watching the landscape carefully, and sometimes placing their own, expensive bets.
Those bets are all part of a trend loosely called “sovereign AI”, in which governments around the world, from the UK to India to Canada, are developing their own AI technologies and attempting to define their place in the emerging ecosystem.
But with hundreds of billions of dollars in play globally, can smaller investments secure meaningful gains?
“While US-based companies and the US government and China are able to essentially blitzkrieg their way into AI dominance, it’s harder for smaller powers, middle powers,” says Trisha Ray, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US strategy thinktank.
“Unless you’re a rich government or a big company, it’s quite a burden to build an LLM from scratch.”
Defence concerns
But many countries are unwilling to rely on foreign AI to supply their needs.
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