Every country should be urged to establish sovereignty over artificial intelligence (AI), Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said during a presentation at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February.
He called this concept “sovereign AI,” which emphasizes a nation “training its own AI by itself.” Countries ought to develop their own national AI infrastructure, data, human labor and business networks to produce AI capabilities that satisfy their national goals and needs.
Sovereign AI includes not only bolstering a nation’s abilities in technical innovation, but also using AI to protect and expand a nation’s culture, language and knowledge, Huang said.
In an era of marginalized economies fracturing under globalization, competition between superpowers the US and China is growing ever fiercer.
The first phase of their competition is mainly a low-level digital sovereignty competition to collect “small yard and high fence” data. Technology is primarily the highlight of this competition.
“Small yard and high fence” refers to the US’ key technology enclosure against China, concentrated in domains such as extreme ultraviolet lithography and advanced AI chips, prohibiting the US private sector from aiding China’s advanced chip development.
However, due to the sharp rise of “sovereign AI,” Sino-American competition has become fiercer.
The US and its allies are set to establish a self-sufficient AI ecosystem institution and digital enclosure against outsiders, forming a “big yard, high fence” alliance.
Meanwhile, through its “new nationwide system,” China has developed its own sovereign AI ecosystem, roping in countries that are dissatisfied with the West with itself at the helm, to challenge what it sees as a Western-centric world view.
Several other countries are also racing to develop sovereign AI. India last month approved the IndiaAI Mission, investing US$12.5 billion. It has also launched computing infrastructure and large language models (LLM), and is planning to build a supercomputer with at least 10,000 GPUs.
Singapore has partnered with Nvidia to build its Sea-Lion (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) LLM. Through training a data set based on 11 languages in the region, it plans to adapt to Southeast Asia’s diverse linguistic environment to support its newly announced National AI Strategy 2.0
Meanwhile, the Netherlands is developing an open LLM called GPT-NL, with the goal of promoting its nation’s values. The Netherlands is also jointly promoting a European sovereign AI plan to become a world leader in AI.
Taiwan’s sovereign AI development policies are focused on establishing sovereign AI technological capabilities and boosting national security.
The National Science and Technology Council is developing its Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE), the purpose of which is to fend off the skewed political misinformation suggested by China’s Baidu search engine, which is based on its Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration LLM.
By developing an integrated Taiwanese culture and traditional Chinese character script-derived model, Taiwan aims to protect its national digital sovereignty, culture and worldview.
However, because of copyrights on content written in traditional Chinese characters, the amount of digital information that Taiwan can consolidate in its language models is limited.
Moreover, the speed performance of the nation’s AI supercomputer is still not fast enough. Taiwan must build an LLM that could rival OpenAI.
Liao Ming-hui is an assistant researcher at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research.
Translated by Tim Smith
The bird flu outbreak at US dairy farms keeps finding alarming new ways to surprise scientists. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that H5N1 is spreading not just from birds to herds, but among cows. Meanwhile, media reports say that an unknown number of cows are asymptomatic. Although the risk to humans is still low, it is clear that far more work needs to be done to get a handle on the reach of the virus and how it is being transmitted. That would require the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to get
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing
The victory of Vice President William Lai (賴清德) in January’s presidential election raised questions about the future of China’s unification strategy toward Taiwan. A decade ago, the assumption in Bejing had been that deepening economic ties with Taiwan would bring about a political accommodation eventually leading to political integration. Not only has this not happened, but it hastened the opposite. Taiwanese are more concerned with safeguarding their political independence than they have ever been. China’s preferred party, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), has not won a presidential election since 2012. Clearly, Beijing’s strategy is not working. Polling conducted by the Institute of European