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Riyadh AI goals require colossal mindset and capital shift

13 September 2024

The ongoing Global AI (Gain) summit in Riyadh is not short on showmanship. Event-branded cars and coaches ferry delegates between their hotels and the car park of the Diplomatic Quarter, where golf carts driven by enthusiastic, cheerful young Saudis await to take them to the chandelier-laden King Abdulaziz International Convention Centre.

The chassis of a luxury electric vehicle from Lucid, which is majority owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and a bright yellow canine-like mobile thermal camera from Boston Dynamics are some of the top crowd drawers at the show, which thousands are attending.

The opening performance of a young Saudi named Omar of the late John Lennon's provocative song Imagine enthralled the audience, composed mainly and albeit ironically of established technology suppliers, startups and venture capitalists looking to create a business or bring home deals out of Saudi Arabia's outsized AI fervour, driven mainly by the need to drive efficiency and foster new industries post-oil.

Abdullah Al-Sharif Alghamdi, president of event proponent Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) – pronounced Sadaya locally – underscored the kingdom's desire to influence the development of global AI standards, ethics and regulations.

Saudi Arabia ascended the 39-member UN Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence last year. SDAIA has also established the International Centre for AI Research & Ethics (ICAIRE), which is being classified as a Category 2 institution under the UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

During the event, SDAIA and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) announced the establishment of a Middle East hub of OECD's AI Policy Observatory, which tracks over 1,000 AI-related policies globally.

Several memorandums of understanding have been signed over the past two days, including making the homegrown seven billion-parameter Allam large-language model available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.

Graphics processing unit (GPU) leader Nvidia also pledged to work with SDAIA to build a 5,000-GPU supercomputing platform in the kingdom, which will likely require close to $200m in investments based on the average unit price of each Blackwell chip. 

PIF, which plans to create a $40bn AI fund, has not so far made any new announcements at the show, where foreign venture capitalists openly declared that they are looking at world-class AI products to invest in.

Crucially, the presence of female Saudis staffing companies that are exhibiting at the show or visiting it is palpable, and somewhat unprecedented for a technology event being held in one of the world's most conservative societies.

It confirms National Center for AI assistant CEO Steve Plimsoll's statement that there are more female Saudis taking engineering and IT courses today than there are males.

This trend, he says, persists in most Saudi startups, providing the best hope yet of overcoming the kingdom's greatest perceived weakness in implementing its AI strategy – the lack of foundational skillsets, which have been the hallmark of technology epicentres such as the US Silicon Valley.

Plimsoll also told MEED that Allam 7B has outperformed the latest, 13 billlion-parameter version of Google's LLM, Llama, in, a recent benchmark, which indicates that the Saudis are indeed making some headways in realising their AI aspirations.

The executive, who previously served as global chief analytics officer at UK-headquartered HSBC, said over 150 developers worked on Allam, which is envisaged, first and foremost, as an enabler of Saudi government services.  

As the excitement and hype dissipate, the real job of making AI deliver on its promise to foster a prosperous, just society will have to begin for the rest of the kingdom's 36.4 million population.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo

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