Dr. Yassine Talaoui
Qatar has surpassed expectations, deterred skeptics, and delivered on its promise of hosting the world cup with flying marks. The question now is where to go from here? What challenge can match that of hosting the world’s biggest sporting event? What path can Qatar pursue to stun the world yet again?
How does capitalizing on AI’s potential sounds like?
Though it may seem a preposterous goal, Qatar can, realistically, lead the region on artificial intelligence (AI) and become an emerging science and technology superpower. Now let me be clear. Qatar has a lot of competition from adjacent and remote countries. And therefore, doing what everybody else sets to achieve may prove to be a path full of thorns. Akin to taking a dive in an already crowded space and going above and beyond against cutthroat competition to grab a meager foothold just because it is what everyone else is doing. Recall the Cheshire cat’s answer to Alice in Wonderland about the road she should take: “it doesn’t matter which road you take if you do not know where you are going”.
Contrary to the frenzy of hyperbolic rhetoric preaching this road as an economic imperative for Qatar, I see it, in the words of Robert Frost, as the road most traveled. And therefore, I seek to inquire into the possibility of Qatar taking the one less traveled. The one having the better claim. A road that suits Qatar’s aspirations, culture, and identity. And that will make all the difference. The road not taken is a melange of blue ocean strategy and Steve Jobs’ strategic mantra. A vision that could break the dawn on an “AI for the rest of us”. Such a customized pursuit would set Qatar apart from the crowd, save it ludicrous amounts of injudicious investments, and establish it as a beacon for improving people’s lives in the region and beyond.
How should Qatar embark on this road, then?
Well, let us have a look at Qatar’s artificial intelligence strategy. Dubbed “AI + X”, it seeks to enhance Qatar’s economic and strategic status and incorporate AI algorithmic cognition into all secular aspects of society.
For this to happen, Qatar needs to become a vibrant algorithm development ecosystem that will foster local talent and attract international data scientists, which can enhance the country’s ability to develop world class AI applications and capture its value at home. But what does a vibrant algorithm development ecosystem mean, anyway? Is it a knowledge-based economy where AI algorithm discoveries are the major capital? Or is it a talent pool whose knowledge and capability drive technological advancements? Or is it both? And if so, where is the distinctive competence of Qatar in this AI red ocean-like race?
Fine tuning this goal would shift its focus toward answering one simple question: how can Qatar possess what is referred to in the AI jargon as the ‘compute’? That is the AI infrastructure or domestic computational power that AI developers desperately seek to develop, train, and operate large language models (LLMs). Having the ‘compute’ at home is what will drive flocks of AI researchers and firms to Qatar for hands-on time to regularly perform experiments on it and learn by doing.
This process is key to AI innovation because it nurtures a compounding effect of knowledge that results from the AI architecture’s ability to scale as more demand of data traffic flows through. So, one sure way for acquiring the ‘compute’ would be lobbying for one of the three hyper-scalers (Google, Amazon, Facebook) to set up data centers in Qatar. Preferably, ones with servers that contain Nvidia’s latest Chips A100 or H100. AI training data centers ingurgitate power and therefore insuring sufficient and cheap supply of electricity would make up an extra incentive for hyper-scalers to set up shop.
The second promise ‘AI+X’ makes is better data access and sharing, and smart regulations. While the latter is of paramount importance, the former overlooks a pressing priority for data centers: the need for refined and clean datasets. This can be within the government’s reach, along with leveraging piles of sovereign data that could generate models of the Qatari society and environment, and the behavior of its population.
Qatar government agencies are ripe for data retrofits and represent a gold mine for AI techies to refine its datasets and train ambitious AI models. Smart regulations thus arise as a crucial component of the AI race and undoubtedly call for a high level of pragmatism that escapes the legislative rabbit hole.
This behooves the government to develop a good understanding of computation policy. For instance, one of Qatar’s neighboring countries deployed Amazon’s cloud to train Falcon—an open-source large language model that vies with OpenAI, and whose goal is to attract gray matter to work on state backed AI projects.
Last, no matter how impressive AI algorithms are, they remain prone to be marred by disinformation, linguistic incompetence, amorality, and faux science. This renders human tuning and judgment decisive factors in the success or failure of the AI journey and in the balancing of creativity with constraint.
Qatar’s road to AI can be a case for the human mind, not against it. An acknowledgement of the prowess of AI as a means by which we can attend to problems, not a myopic race for advancements that blend into our technology a distorted conception of language and knowledge. It can be a path that distinguishes between the true and false promise of AI and, by extension, takes the chance to leap over AI’s superficial and suspicious descriptive and predictive quality. The time to make a choice is now.
Dr. Yassine Talaoui. Assistant Professor in Strategic Management at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Organizational Excellence at Qatar University.
Assistant Professor in Strategic Management at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Organizational Excellence, College of Business and Economics, Qatar University.
