Vladimir Putin wants to catch up with the West in AI

SIX YEARSGPTAIAIAIAI GPTAIAILLMGPT ago, before anyone had heard of Chat, Vladimir Putin said that the country that led the development of artificial intelligence () would become the “ruler of the world”. He echoed the sentiment in December, when he suggested that Russia should “head and lead” the march of . Those comments came in response to a video-caller during a televised phone-in who had taken on the Russian president’s likeness using an apparently -generated deepfake, seemingly startling the real-life strongman for a moment.For Mr Putin, “leading” on is part of an ideological battle with the West. The success of tools such as Chat, developed by an American startup called Open, has led him to decry the dangers of relying on Western s trained on English-language data. Western “large language models” (s) could, Mr Putin avers, “cancel” Russia’s perspective on the world if unchallenged. They also threaten a regime that has sought to control the Russian internet in recent years, a process accelerated by the invasion of Ukraine. To no one’s surprise, the Kremlin banned Chat shortly after its launch in November 2022. Several Russian companies are hard at work trying to build alternatives.