While Pakistan was still counting votes and figuring out who won these elections, Dubai was hosting the three-day World Governments Summit 2024 from February 12 to 14.

Speakers included heads of governments and international organizations, and leaders from business, media, and academia. The sessions covered a variety of areas, including government acceleration & transformation, development & future economies, future societies & education, sustainability, urbanization & global health. Also among them was artificial intelligence (AI) & the next frontiers.

On the latter theme, invited speakers included some of the most influential people in AI today. Key among them on Day 1 of the summit was Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA which has a near monopoly on making the chips, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), that are orders of magnitude more efficient (in terms of speed and power consumption) at accelerating the kind of computations needed for gaming PCs, cryptocurrency mining rigs and AI applications.

In the current AI gold rush, if big-, medium- and small-tech companies are prospecting for gold, NVIDIA is the one selling all of them shovels. The session was hosted by UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications H E Omar Sultan Alolama.

The overarching theme of Huang’s session was the democratization of AI. While AI is receiving increasing attention in Pakistan’s policy circles and is seeing matching excitement on the domestic tech startup scene, this aspect of AI still receives far too little coverage. Huang’s perspective is that most of the foundation models from big- and not-so-big tech companies making headlines for the last year are trained (developed) on ‘Western’ data and mostly English language text. A country and society’s data codifies its language, culture, history, and societal intelligence and that will extend to AI models trained on it.

The Industrial Revolution was a transformation of raw materials into finished products, enabled early on by the conversion of energy trapped in fossil fuels to steam and later to electrons moving through copper wires (‘electricity’). The computer /internet revolution was powered by the invention of the microprocessor CPU which accelerated the transmission and processing of information. Now, the AI revolution, powered by the GPU which has accelerated computations by a factor of a million, is transforming data into intelligence that can be nearly........

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