The author writes: 

• “Whoever leads in AI will rule the world,” President Vladimir Putin declared at an address commencing the 2017 Russian school year. Six years later, despite intense focus from senior leadership and heavy investment from the federal budget and state-owned enterprises, Russia remains a laggard in this field, hobbled by international isolation and structural challenges. 
• Although Russian is the second or third-most common language of online data, it still only accounts for 5% of the total. The difference between a model trained on a scale of data the size of the Russian internet and the size of the whole internet is the same as the difference between ChatGPT-3 and the state-of-art models of 2019, when large language models were still an obscure oddity for computational linguists. This gulf will only widen.
• The government has made the problem worse still with draconian laws to curtail information unfavorable to the state. Most large language models are probabilistic rather than deterministic, meaning the same input won’t necessarily produce the same result. That means anything that could produce a politically sensitive answer must be scrubbed. 
• The overall outlook for Russia’s AI sector is bleak. Stanford’s ranking of the world’s centers of AI development places the country beneath Norway and just above Denmark, whose combined populations are smaller than that of Moscow. Having launched a war that drove out much of the country’s tech talent, provoked sanctions that led to a shortage of necessary hardware, and passed laws that handicap any generative AI offering, Russia finds itself hopelessly behind in the race to develop this critical technology.
• The war in Ukraine has backfired on Russia in almost every conceivable way, from kickstarting NATO expansion to affirming the Ukrainian national consciousness. If Putin truly believes the future masters of AI will be masters of the universe, the war’s closing of Russia’s narrow window to catch up in the field may be the most devastating consequence of all.

Read the full article on The Moscow Times website.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. Photo by the Kremlin shared under public licence.