Sonja Hutson

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates want to be leaders in artificial intelligence. So they’re buying thousands of high-performance computer chips. Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence editor, and she joins me now to discuss. Hey, Madhu.

Madhumita Murgia

Hi, there.

Sonja Hutson

So it seems like these two countries now have the chips that they need to make a lot of progress with AI. You’ve reported that’s kind of step one. But step two is making sure they have the right personnel in place, right?

Madhumita Murgia

Yeah. So that’s the hard part, because in particular, we’re talking about generative AI, the kind of software that creates things like words, images, you know, video, music, code. And there aren’t that many people in the world who know how to build large language models, which is the kind of technology that powers ChatGPT. And most of them are in the US, on the west coast, some in the UK. China also has been racing to catch up. So this is basically a scarce resource. It’s not enough just to attract them with money because they’re getting that through investment in the US as well. So I think that will be the big challenge.

Sonja Hutson

And what are they doing to attract this really rare talent into their countries?

Madhumita Murgia

So the UAE partnered with a French start-up, essentially brought over a bunch of really smart AI researchers. And these researchers help to build something that is seen widely as one of the most advanced models out there. And in Saudi Arabia, what we reported was that one of the universities, which is the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, they were buying chips. And the labs there were mostly staffed by Chinese researchers. So I think that, you know, having to be creative, if they can’t get to the sort of US and UK talent that’s currently building these models at companies in the west.

Sonja Hutson

So I do want to point out that neither of these countries are democracies. They also have pretty poor human rights records. Given that, are there concerns about potential misuse of this technology?

Madhumita Murgia

I think it’s fair to say that there are concerns, particularly, you know, the question of ethics and guardrails with AI models is one that’s being widely discussed by governments. So there are a lot of kind of inherent ethical concerns paired with the fact that these are autocracies that have cracked down on human rights defenders and journalists in the past.

Sonja Hutson

Has Nvidia, the company that sold them these chips, have they said anything about the potential for misuse?

Madhumita Murgia

No, they haven’t. We spoke to the CEO of Nvidia earlier this year and, you know, they have this really hot commodity that everybody’s fighting over at the moment in the tech world. And he said to us, their CEO Jensen Huang, they’re not going to discriminate between sort of large companies versus start-ups, and they are selling it to whoever wants to build AI stuff with it. And I guess that’s what they’re doing with the UAE and Saudi Arabia as well. They have announced previously partnerships with the two countries in terms of building local supercomputing infrastructure with them. So they have publicly said that they’re collaborating.

Sonja Hutson

Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence editor. Thanks, Madhu.

Madhumita Murgia

Thank you.