Nations seek ‘sovereign AI’ in global tech race

EVERY COUNTRY SHOULD be urged to establish sovereignty over artificial intelligence (AI), Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said during a presentation at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February.

He called this concept “sovereign AI,” which emphasizes a nation “training its own AI by itself.” Countries ought to develop their own national AI infrastructure, data, human labor and business networks to produce AI capabilities that satisfy their national goals and needs.

Sovereign AI includes not only bolstering a nation’s abilities in technical innovation, but also using AI to protect and expand a nation’s culture, language and knowledge, Huang said.

In an era of marginalized economies fracturing under globalization, competition between superpowers the US and China is growing ever fiercer.

The first phase of their competition is mainly a low-level digital sovereignty competition to collect “small yard and high fence” data. Technology is primarily the highlight of this competition.

“Small yard and high fence” refers to the US’ key technology enclosure against China, concentrated in domains such as extreme ultraviolet lithography and advanced AI chips, prohibiting the US private sector from aiding China’s advanced chip development.

However, due to the sharp rise of “sovereign AI,” Sino-American competition has become fiercer.

The US and its allies are set to establish a self-sufficient AI ecosystem institution and digital enclosure against outsiders, forming a “big yard, high fence” alliance.

Meanwhile, through its “new nationwide system,” China has developed its own sovereign AI ecosystem, roping in countries that are dissatisfied with the West with itself at the helm, to challenge what it sees as a Westerncentric world view.

Several other countries are also racing to develop sovereign AI. India last month approved the IndiaAI Mission, investing US$12.5 billion. It has also launched computing infrastructure and large language models (LLM), and is planning to build a supercomputer with at least 10,000 GPUs.

Singapore has partnered with Nvidia to build its Sea-Lion (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) LLM. Through training a data set based on 11 languages in the region, it plans to adapt to Southeast Asia’s diverse linguistic environment to support its newly announced National AI Strategy 2.0

Meanwhile, the Netherlands is developing an open LLM called GPT-NL, with the goal of promoting its nation’s values. The Netherlands is also jointly promoting a European sovereign AI plan to become a world leader in AI.

Taiwan’s sovereign AI development policies are focused on establishing sovereign AI technological capabilities and boosting national security.

The National Science and Technology Council is developing its Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE), the purpose of which is to fend off the skewed political misinformation suggested by China’s Baidu search engine, which is based on its Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration LLM.

By developing an integrated Taiwanese culture and traditional Chinese character script-derived model, Taiwan aims to protect its national digital sovereignty, culture and worldview.

However, because of copyrights on content written in traditional Chinese characters, the amount of digital information that Taiwan can consolidate in its language models is limited.

Moreover, the speed performance of the nation’s AI supercomputer is still not fast enough. Taiwan must build an LLM that could rival OpenAI.