A New War Over AI

Shah Gilani|January 5, 2024

While ChatGPT, Bard and a host of other AI names and labels overwhelmed us in 2023, a new banner will command our attention this year.

AI nationalism.

With the AI frontier currently resembling a war zone, the U.S., China, South Korea, Brazil, Singapore, the European Union, multiple Middle Eastern countries, Australia and others are vying for control of AI’s nuclear buttons.

It’s not just the promise of increased productivity and expedited access to knowledge that nations want to have control over…

It’s the future of the human race.

With so much at stake and the U.S. and China already engaged in a digital cold war, I predict AI nationalism will add to geopolitical tensions and engender new ones while disrupting markets this year.

The stakes are rising. Spending on AI-related data, software, chips and applications is soaring, and investment in AI is exploding.

McKinsey expects AI’s global impact to be between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually starting this year.

Investment bank TD Cowen recently reported it sees annual AI-related software spending in the U.S. rising from $1 billion in 2022 to $81 billion in 2027.

That’s a compound annual growth rate of 192%.

We’re talking about a lot of money – and a lot of power.

It’s no wonder we’re seeing huge investments pop up around the globe… and governments loosening regulations to make those investments possible.

On December 11, a 7-month-old French AI startup, Mistral AI (named after the warm winds that blow up through the south of the country), announced a $400 million funding round. That gave the young company a $2 billion valuation.

Just a few days later, Indian startup Krutrim unveiled the country’s first multilingual large language model (LLM).

Then, a week later, Sarvam, a 5-month-old Indian startup, raised $41 million to build Indian language models.

India’s light AI regulations – or, as some critics see it, its lack of regulations – make the nation a go-to destination for technology businesses in general.

In November, Abu Dhabi launched AI71, a state-backed AI company, to commercialize Falcon, its LLM. Most of the work on Falcon was done at Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first AI-focused school. The university is home to top professors and scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

And petrostates – or autocracies – like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been more freewheeling in their approach to AI regulation than democratic nations, which must heed voters’ concerns about AI.

In Europe, Germany is footing a third of the $33 billion bill for a new chip factory to be built there by Intel.

Over the next five years, the U.K. is channeling $1.3 billion into AI and supercomputing.

While nations like India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and China go about regulating AI on their own, members of the EU are fighting over who will have latitude outside of the bloc’s already hotly contested AI Act, a set of guidelines and rules being debated in Brussels.

The French and German governments are already pushing back on EU principles because they could constrain France’s Mistral and Germany’s LLM model-builder, Aleph Alpha, which raised close to $500 million in November.

The race is on.

Nations want to have control over AI technology, which will ultimately transform everything from defense, banking, healthcare, elections… every sector of every nations’ economy, really.

No nation wants to rely on imported AI.

That’s why there will be a contentious global race to develop and regulate AI this year.

While I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, laissez-faire free market capitalist… I’m going outside my comfort zone and advocating a nationalist approach to ring-fencing and regulating AI.

And, of course, I want the world leader to be the United States.

Nationalizing AI in the U.S. in any way won’t work, of course. Our free markets are too entrepreneurial and important for the government to stymie the growth engine that’s powered America and the world for as long as there’s been “technology.”

But the U.S. needs to – and should – set the goalposts for AI.

If the world’s going to profit from AI instead of being destroyed by it, the U.S., a democratic republic, has to be the ultimate regulator of AI.

That’s a contentious opinion, I know. And that’s why we’ll see geopolitical tensions rise and markets fluctuate this year.

Whether Washington can get its act together remains to be seen…

But we need to establish guideposts that will make AI safe, productive and profitable before our enemies – and allies – take matters into their own hands.

Note: No question, there will be winners and losers in this fight. But with trillions of dollars on the line… I’ve uncovered one group of AI stocks that will see a massive boom in 2024 as this battle plays out. Get the details here.