Putin unveils Russia’s new AI strategy to rival Western AIs

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Vladimir Putin has unveiled Russia’s new strategy for developemnt in the artificial intelligence front to counter Western influence over the technology and protect the country’s culture.

“Our domestic models of artificial intelligence must reflect the entire wealth and diversity of world culture, the heritage, knowledge, and wisdom of all civilizations,” the Russian president reportedly said at the Artificial Intelligence Journey conference in Moscow on Friday.

He claimed investment in AI development in the country was increasing across sectors.

Citing the example of Gazprom Neft, Mr Putin said one of Russia’s largest oil producers was using AI to slash the cost of oil well development and to address complicated logistics safety issues.

“I hope we will be more active in this area. When I say ‘we,’ I am referring not only to the Government but also to the regions and industries, and individual plants,” Mr Putin said.

The Russian leader said the country would intensify its research into the domains of generative AI and large language models which are behind trending tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbots.

Speaking about such AI models, he said these tools have began to reveal their potential just a year ago, but added that not everything about them is ideal yet.

Mr Putin pointed to “Western search engines” and generative AI models, calling them “very selective and biased.”

“They do not take into account and sometimes simply ignore and cancel Russian culture. In simple terms, the machine is given some creative assignment and performs it using only the English language database,” he said.

“Thus, the algorithm may tell the machine that Russia, our culture, science, music and literature simply do not exist. They are cancelled in the digital space, as it were,” the Russian president said at the conference.

AI created according to “Western standards”, he said, may emerge as a “kind of xenophobe”.

English speaking countries currently appear to dominate AI development, with Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) claiming the US and UK were further ahead in the technology than the rest of the world.

The Russian president warned that the “monopolistic dominance” of the technology was “unacceptable, dangerous and inadmissible”.

“Our innovations should rest on our traditional values, the wealth and beauty of the Russian language and languages of other peoples in Russia,” Mr Putin added.

To achieve such development, he called for the scaling up pf Russia’s supercomputing power and to improve its top-level AI education.