MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the West had a “dangerous” monopoly over artificial intelligence and Russia needed to rival “biased” Western chatbots with its own technology.
The race to develop AI has heated up since the breakout launch of the ChatGPT generative chatbot last year, with Russia and China spending billions to rival the United States’ dominance in the field.
“I think you are well aware that some Western search engines, as well as some generative models, often work in a very selective, biased way,” Putin told an AI conference in Moscow.
“They do not take into account Russian culture, and sometimes simply ignore and cancel it... Many modern systems are trained on Western data for the Western market,” he said.
“The monopoliztic domination of such foreign creations in Russia is unacceptable, dangerous and inadmissible,” he said, urging Russia to be “ahead of the curve.”
Russia’s tech industry has reeled from Moscow’s ongoing military offensive in Ukraine.
Thousands of IT workers have fled to avoid military mobilization and Western sanctions have blocked access to computer parts.
Putin has repeatedly called for Moscow to end its dependence on Western technology and in September ordered his government to pour funding into developing supercomputers and AI research.
ChatGPT’s success sparked a rush among other tech firms and venture capitalists, with Google hurrying out its own chatbot and investors throwing cash into all manner of AI projects.
In April, Russia’s largest banking company Sber announced the launch of its own conversational artificial intelligence app called “Gigachat” but in test mode only.
Putin says Russia must rival ‘dangerous’ Western AI
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Putin says Russia must rival ‘dangerous’ Western AI
- The race to develop AI has heated up since the breakout launch of the ChatGPT generative chatbot last year
- “I think you are well aware that some Western search engines, as well as some generative models, often work in a very selective, biased way,” Putin told an AI conference
Chile wildfires leave 19 dead amid extreme heat as scores evacuated
- Fast-moving wildfires being worsened by intense heat, winds
- Firefighters battling 23 active blazes spreading toward cities
CONCEPCION, Chile: Wildfires in Chile have left at least 19 people dead, authorities said on Monday, as the government carried out mass evacuations and fought nearly two dozen blazes exacerbated by intense heat and high winds.
While weather conditions overnight helped control some fires, the largest were still active, with adverse conditions expected throughout the day, security minister, Luis Cordero, said at a news briefing on Monday.
“The projection we have today is of high temperatures,” Cordero said, and the main worry was that new fires would be triggered throughout the region.
Parts of central and southern Chile were under extreme heat warnings with temperatures expected to reach up to 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit).
STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED IN NUBLE, BIO BIO
As of late Sunday, Chile’s CONAF forestry agency said firefighters were combating 23 fires across the country, the largest of which were in regions of Ñuble and Bío Bío, where President Gabriel Boric declared a state of catastrophe.
Over 20,000 hectares (77 square miles) have been razed so far, an area about the size of Seattle, with the largest fire surpassing 14,000 hectares on the outskirts of the coastal city Concepcion.
The fast-moving blaze tore through the towns of Penco and Lirquen over the weekend, destroying hundreds of homes and killing several people, with authorities still assessing the damage.
HEAT, BLAZES ALSO IMPACT ARGENTINA
Authorities are currently battling the fire as it threatened Manzano prison on the edge of Concepcion and the town of Tome to the north.
Both Chile and Argentina rang in the new year with heat waves which have continued into January. Earlier this month, wildfires broke out in Argentina’s Patagonia, burning around 15,000 hectares.
