Article by Sam Winter-Levy: “In a vast conference room, below chandeliers and flashing lights, dozens of dancers waved fluorescent bars in an intricately choreographed routine. Green Matrix code rained down in the background on a screen that displayed skyscrapers soaring from a desert landscape. The world was witnessing the emergence of “a sublime and transcendent entity,” a narrator declared: artificial intelligence. As if to highlight AI’s transformative potential, a digital avatar—Artificial Superintelligence One—approached a young boy and together they began to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The audience applauded enthusiastically. With that, the final day dawned on what one government minister in attendance described as the “world’s largest AI thought leadership event.”
This surreal display took place not in Palo Alto or Menlo Park but in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the third edition of the city’s Global AI Summit, in September of this year. In a cavernous exhibition center next to the Ritz Carlton, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman imprisoned hundreds of wealthy Saudis on charges of corruption in 2017,robots poured tea and mixed drinks. Officials in ankle-length white robes hailed Saudi Arabia’s progress on AI. American and Chinese technology companies pitched their products and announced memorandums of understanding with the government. Attendantsdistributed stickers that declared, “Data is the new oil.”
For Saudi Arabia and its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), AI plays an increasingly central role in their attempts to transform their oil wealth into new economic models before the world transitions away from fossil fuels. For American AI companies, hungry for capital and energy, the two Gulf states and their sovereign wealth funds are tantalizing partners. And some policymakers in Washington see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to promise access to American computing power in a bid to lure the Gulf states away from China and deepen an anti-Iranian coalition in the Middle East….The two Gulf states’ interest in AI is not new, but it has intensified in recent months. Saudi Arabia plans to create a $40 billion fund to invest in AI and has set up Silicon Valley–inspired startup accelerators to entice coders to Riyadh. In 2019, the UAE launched the world’s first university dedicated to AI, and since 2021, the number of AI workers in the country has quadrupled, according to government figures. The UAE has also released a series of open-source large language models that it claims rival those of Google and Meta, and earlier this year it launched an investment firm focused on AI and semiconductors that could surpass $100 billion in assets under management…(More)”.