"Around the world, language models like these are part of an AI arms race worth hundreds of billions of dollars mostly driven by a few powerful companies in the US and China. As giants such as OpenAI, Meta and Alibaba plough vast sums into developing increasingly powerful models, middle powers and developing countries are watching the landscape carefully, and sometimes placing their own, expensive bets."
"Those bets are all part of a trend loosely called sovereign AI, in which governments around the world, from the UK to India to Canada, are developing their own AI technologies and attempting to define their place in the emerging ecosystem."
"While US-based companies and the US government and China are able to essentially blitzkrieg their way into AI dominance, it's harder for smaller powers, middle powers, says Trisha Ray, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US strategy thinktank. Unless you're a rich government or a big company, it's quite a burden to build an LLM from scratch."
Countries across regions are building localized AI models to handle specific languages, dialects and cultural contexts, from Southeast Asia to Switzerland. Governments and private local firms are investing in tailored systems to reduce reliance on foreign providers and to address defence, regulatory and linguistic needs. Major tech firms in the US and China continue to invest huge sums, creating a high-stakes environment that challenges smaller actors. Building large language models remains costly and resource-intensive, prompting middle powers to pursue targeted, sovereign AI initiatives that emphasize localization, control and strategic autonomy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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