Western backing for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of the land has led to the Russian president blaming nations such as the US and UK for Russia’s troubles and attempting to pit Moscow against the West in any way he can. AI is his most recent target, and he claims that AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbots “cancel Russian culture” and that the West has a “dangerous” monopoly on the technology.
Vladimir Putin has urged Russia’s IT sector to create powerful AI models, saying that such tools may be abused by countries seeking to “win wars or manipulate electorates.” Russia’s Putin demands greater funding for development, as his country falls behind nations like the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Our innovations should be based on our traditional values [and] the wealth and beauty of the Russian language,” Mr. Putin added, like many other recent anti-Western statements.
In an interview earlier this year, Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “Godfather of AI,” mentioned the Russian president, saying that Mr. Putin or others may “want to use them for winning wars or manipulating electorates.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at an AI conference in Moscow on Friday, saying that Russian investment in AI development is increasing across all sectors. Mr. Putin cited Gazprom Neft as an example of how one of Russia’s top oil producers was utilizing AI to reduce the cost of oil well development and address complex logistics safety issues.
“I’m hoping that we’ll be more active in this area.” “When I say ‘we,’ I mean not only the government but also regions, industries, and individual plants,” Mr. Putin explained.
The Russian president stated that his country would increase its research into generative AI and massive language models, which now lag behind prominent Western-developed tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbots. To make such progress, he advocated for increasing Russia’s supercomputing power and improving its top-tier AI academic programs.
“Our domestic models of artificial intelligence must reflect the entire wealth and diversity of world culture, the heritage, knowledge, and wisdom of all civilizations,” he told the audience.
English-speaking countries now dominate AI development, according to Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), which claims the US and UK are technologically ahead of the rest of the world.
A rising body of research exposes the bias in AI models produced predominantly in English-speaking countries. Research published in the journal Cell in July, for example, found that GPT detectors commonly label actual writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated.
Another bias: If you're a non-native English writer, GPT detectors will frequently classify your writing as #AI-generatedhttps://t.co/xPAeCstivF @james_y_zou @liang_weixin @Stanford pic.twitter.com/0qUygrEuac
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 10, 2023
Observers have also remarked that OpenAI’s current GPT-4 AI model performs well in English, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, and other Latin alphabet-based languages but has difficulties in Thai, Punjabi, and other alphabet-based languages.
