KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (DUBAI)
Dr. Alexander Karp, Co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, a major global player in big data analytics, told the World Governments Summit 2024 (WGS) in Dubai on Wednesday that he believed the UAE is among the nations most likely to “win” the AI revolution.
“If you wanted to just do a simple diagnostic of who's going to win and who's going to lose, take this conference, print out the agenda and the people who attended, and measure every other conference against this,” Karp said.
“What you'll see is that they had the right people, they had the right topics, they had the right weighting of topics, they had the right understanding of issues, even there, this just shows you this is an expression of an underlying understanding of what the technology is, and that is inconceivably valuable in a world where very, very few people understand what the outlines of what large language models are, what they can do, and what they can't do.”
Karp said that a mixture of competent leadership, an able and technical population, and a lack of civil unrest would allow countries like the UAE to leapfrog and become major winners in the incoming AI disruption.
“In America, we have the problem that this is a revolution that will raise GDP, but at the same time, the relative difference between the poor and the rich is going to get even greater. So that's something no one wants to talk about. But then you have the problem, say, in continental Europe, where you're basically pretending the revolution isn't happening, because… the providers aren't from there,” he explained.
“And then, you have a culture like this one, where you have a small number of people, it's much easier, especially as they are very technical.”
Karp said that he has long invested in the UAE based on many of these factors, something which he said was a great decision, retrospectively. While he noted his belief that US companies like his own will continue to saturate the industry, he said that smaller, dynamic countries could make major gains in the industry.
“If your people are technical, educated, and loyal, you can build on top of that base.”