Who fears the China-Saudi Arabia alliance on AI chips. Report Financial Times
Saudi Arabia's main university could compromise Riyadh's access to US artificial intelligence chips given its ties to Chinese researchers
Saudi-Chinese collaboration in artificial intelligence has sparked fears within the Gulf kingdom's premier academic institution that the ties could jeopardize the university's access to US-made chips needed to power the new technology. The Financial Times writes.
Professor Jinchao Xu, a Chinese-American mathematician from Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust), launched AceGPT, a large-scale Arabic language model, in collaboration with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ), and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data.
SAUDI ARABIA WANTS AI CHIPS
The move is part of Saudi Arabia's efforts to lead the regional development of AI technology by building large supercomputers and launching LLMs, the technology behind generative AI systems such as chatbots. Together with the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf power is trying to compete with AI companies and create models tailored to Arabic speakers.
Western officials have long expressed concern about the growing transfer of technology between their traditional Gulf allies and China.
The United States has expanded export licensing requirements for graphics processing units made by Nvidia and AMD, blocking Chinese entities from accessing cutting-edge chips critical to building generative AI models. But the Biden administration has not blocked exports to the Middle East.
However, Kaust associates seeking to obtain these chips believe that limiting Chinese cooperation is critical to ensuring delivery.
“Many people involved have expressed concern to company leaders that relations with China put the supercomputer at risk,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “They don't want to upset the US government.”
Artificial intelligence has become one of the regional battlegrounds of competition between China and the United States in the Gulf, where Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are determined to leverage burgeoning trade relations to include technology transfer, while bolstering ties with Washington, their main security partner.
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Abu Dhabi has launched a new version of its Falcon model, which it claims is more than twice as powerful as Meta's Llama 2, previously considered the most sophisticated "open source" model. G42, a company controlled by the UAE's national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, which has collaborated with China on vaccines and laboratory tests, also issued an LLM in Arabic.
U.S. officials are stepping up efforts to lure Gulf states away from China, including by supporting a rail and sea corridor linking India to Europe via the Middle East.
The Gulf's latest move in artificial intelligence comes as Kaust president Tony Chan continues his outreach to China, signing deals with Shenzhen universities to share research capabilities and exchange talent . Last month he wrote an essay in Foreign Policy titled “America Can't Stop China's Rise. And he should stop trying."
Kaust said exchange between Saudi Arabia and China is “flourishing,” as evidenced by the growing presence of Chinese academics at the university, including 20% of students, 34% of postdoctoral researchers and 9% of members of the faculty.
A Kaust staffer said Chinese universities offered cheaper interns and students capable of performing routine work, including GPU testing and data sifting.
Kaust's AI initiative, led by German computer scientist Jurgen Schmidhuber, is developing a more powerful supercomputer, Shaheen III, which aims to provide 20 times the computing power of the existing system.
In response to questions about the new LLM, Kaust described the AceGPT project as “an individual research project by one of our professors” that “was not run on the Shaheen II supercomputer.” The chatbot is trained in Arabic, Chinese and English.
Kaust said it “has relationships with many countries around the world” and that its “investments in GPUs are based on the needs of its academic community to implement projects that are meaningful to the Kingdom it serves.”
“When it comes to research collaborations, our supercomputers and other computing infrastructure cannot be accessed without rigorous controls and compliance with international regulations,” he added.
The university said it had contracted with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to supply the Shaheen III system, for which the US company chose Nvidia chips. Kaust did not purchase the chips directly from Nvidia, the university added. Kaust has not yet received the order.
HPE said it was monitoring export controls and was “committed to serving our customers around the world in line with US government guidelines.”
Kaust also said it is compliant with US export control regulations and has a monitoring framework in place to meet safeguards regulations to operate Shaheen III.
“Physical and system software access to Shaheen III is limited to the Kaust Core Labs system administrator and Hewlett Packard Enterprise teams.”
(Extract from the eprcommunication press review)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cina-arabia-saudita-chip-intelligenza-artificiale/ on Sun, 15 Oct 2023 05:06:29 +0000.