Russia wants to compete with the West in AI

According to Reuters news agency, President Vladimir Putin recently warned that the West must not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and said that a more ambitious Russian strategy on AI development will soon be approved.

China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders believe will transform the world and revolutionize society in much the same way as the advent of computers in the 20th century.

Russia also has ambitions to become an AI powerhouse, but Moscow's efforts have been hampered by the conflict in Ukraine, which has forced many talented experts to leave Russia, and Western sanctions that are hampering the country's high-tech imports.

Speaking at an AI conference in Moscow alongside Sberbank CEO German Gref, President Putin said that seeking to ban AI was impossible, despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies.

“You can’t ban something – if we ban it, it will develop elsewhere and we will fall behind,” Mr Putin said of AI, although he said ethical questions should be addressed based on Russia’s “traditional” culture.

Mr Putin said Russia's new AI strategy would make significant changes, including "expanding basic and applied research in the field of general artificial intelligence and large language models".

According to him, Russian researchers should have better access to supercomputers – which he said needs to be greatly enhanced – while Russia's top-level scientific education in AI needs to be improved.

President Putin stressed that Russia will have to change its laws, strengthen international cooperation and ensure more investment in the development of AI.

Mr Putin also warned that some Western online search engines and aggregators have ignored or even eliminated the Russian language and culture. “Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems is unacceptable and dangerous,” he said.

By most rankings, China and the US are far ahead of other countries in AI research, although European countries as well as India, Russia, Israel, South Korea and Japan are also in the rankings.

For Russia, however, the conflict in Ukraine and its mobilization efforts have caused a large exodus of educated Russians while Western sanctions have cut international cooperation with Western AI powers.