President Putin Asks Russia Not To Be Left Behind In The Development Of Artificial Intelligence

Russian President Vladimir Putin (photo: x @KremlinRussia_E)

JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Friday 24 November that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He also said that Russia's much more ambitious strategy for AI development would soon be approved.

China and the United States lead the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders believe will change the world and revolutionize society like computer recognition in the 20th century.

Moscow has ambitions to become an AI force as well. But its efforts have been hampered by the war in Ukraine which has prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and sparked Western sanctions that have hampered high-tech imports in the country.

Speaking at an AI conference in Moscow with Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI is impossible even though it sometimes has worrying ethical and social consequences from new technologies.

"You can't ban something - if we ban it, it will develop elsewhere and we will be left behind," Putin said of AI. But he said ethical questions must be solved with references to Russia's "traditional" culture.

Putin warned that some online search systems and Western generative models ignore or even cancel Russian language and culture. The Western algorithm, he said, basically assumes that Russia does not exist.

"Of course, monopolies and the dominance of such systems, foreign systems, are unacceptable and dangerous," he said.

China and the United States are much more advanced than other countries in AI research, according to most of the rankings, although groups of both European countries as well as India, Russia, Israel, South Korea, and Japan also listed themselves in the rankings.

For Russia, however, the war in Ukraine and efforts to mobilize the fighters sparked the release of a large number of educated Russian educators, while Western sanctions have cut international cooperation with AI power in the West.

"In all areas of our lives, humanity is starting a new chapter of its existence," Putin said of AI. He added that Russia needs to increase its game in AI both in ambition and execution.

"In the near future, as one of the first steps, a presidential decree will be signed and a new version of the national strategy for the development of artificial intelligence will be approved," Putin told the conference.

Putin said the new strategy would make significant changes, including "developing basic and applied research in the field of generative artificial intelligence and large language models".

According to him, Russian researchers should be given better access to supercomputers - which he said needed to be improved rapidly - while Russia's high-level scientific education on AI also needs to be improved.

Russia, he said, must change laws, increase international cooperation, and ensure much larger investments for AI development.

Putin praised Sberbank and Yandex for their own development in the generative AI and language models - which he said needed to be further developed and applied to the economic sector.

Gref changed Sberbank, formerly known as an ancient Soviet Union savings bank where people queued for hours to pay bills, by overseeing investments in AI, cloud services, big data, and smart devices. He notified Putin in June that Sberbank generates about $3 billion annually from a $1 billion investment in AI.