It’s a vast answer that I’m not 100% finished with myself, but the premise imo is the same way many of these countries jumped through the adoption of the personal computer straight to smartphones. They didn’t have the ‘development’ (infrastructure, budget, industry etc) to support personal computers but once smartphones came around they modernized with those directly, and 4G too without even going through cable internet – 4G is super popular in Africa even in poorer areas and they’re investing in coverage.
In the same way they see AI as something they can adopt to help with their national challenges, for example healthcare to name just one – which is a very complex problem with brain drain, lack of infrastructure for people to get to the hospital, etc – so if they find a way to provide healthcare with AI somewhere in the process, they could treat more people more easily. Other industries are food, construction, education, electrification, etc.
From an economic perspective it reduces cost of production when you integrate it into the process and therefore can help countries under sanctions and embargos get more mileage out of what they do have available. H100 gpus are forbidden from being exported to China, they can only get H20 which have 20% of the capabilities, so they are developing their own alternative - probably using AI in the process to develop them faster (maybe not yet in chips directly but I know they’re using AI in other industries already). It’s helping stretch what they can access to get the most out of it. In the meantime, they are stretching these H20s like with alibaba’s new cloud algorithm which was posted on the grad some time ago, that reduced the resources load by 82% and therefore fewer GPUs needed to support their center.
Iran has recently published guidelines for AI usage in academia, and they now allow it provided you note the model you used, time used, and that you can prove you understand the topic. All of these countries are also very interested in open-source AI since they can develop on it and avoid one-sided proprietary deals. They have a need to “catch up” as fast as possible and see AI as a way to accelerate their development and close the gap with the imperial core.
And of course Cuba announced not so long ago it would make its own LLM, though I’m not sure where that is at currently.
We are still in the premises of it all of course, but that’s the trend I’m seeing. It’s difficult to find info from these countries about how they are using or plan to use AI right now, but I did find this news that Malaysia, Rwanda and the UAE have signed a strategic partnership to boost AI adoption in the global south: https://www.bernama.com/en/news.php?id=2451825
It’s a vast answer that I’m not 100% finished with myself, but the premise imo is the same way many of these countries jumped through the adoption of the personal computer straight to smartphones. They didn’t have the ‘development’ (infrastructure, budget, industry etc) to support personal computers but once smartphones came around they modernized with those directly, and 4G too without even going through cable internet – 4G is super popular in Africa even in poorer areas and they’re investing in coverage.
In the same way they see AI as something they can adopt to help with their national challenges, for example healthcare to name just one – which is a very complex problem with brain drain, lack of infrastructure for people to get to the hospital, etc – so if they find a way to provide healthcare with AI somewhere in the process, they could treat more people more easily. Other industries are food, construction, education, electrification, etc.
From an economic perspective it reduces cost of production when you integrate it into the process and therefore can help countries under sanctions and embargos get more mileage out of what they do have available. H100 gpus are forbidden from being exported to China, they can only get H20 which have 20% of the capabilities, so they are developing their own alternative - probably using AI in the process to develop them faster (maybe not yet in chips directly but I know they’re using AI in other industries already). It’s helping stretch what they can access to get the most out of it. In the meantime, they are stretching these H20s like with alibaba’s new cloud algorithm which was posted on the grad some time ago, that reduced the resources load by 82% and therefore fewer GPUs needed to support their center.
Iran has recently published guidelines for AI usage in academia, and they now allow it provided you note the model you used, time used, and that you can prove you understand the topic. All of these countries are also very interested in open-source AI since they can develop on it and avoid one-sided proprietary deals. They have a need to “catch up” as fast as possible and see AI as a way to accelerate their development and close the gap with the imperial core.
And of course Cuba announced not so long ago it would make its own LLM, though I’m not sure where that is at currently.
We are still in the premises of it all of course, but that’s the trend I’m seeing. It’s difficult to find info from these countries about how they are using or plan to use AI right now, but I did find this news that Malaysia, Rwanda and the UAE have signed a strategic partnership to boost AI adoption in the global south: https://www.bernama.com/en/news.php?id=2451825