Countries that do not embrace AI could be left behind, says OpenAI’s George Osborne | George Osborne
Former chancellor George Osborne has said countries that do not adopt powerful artificial intelligence systems produced by his new employer OpenAI risk “Fomo” and could be left weaker and poorer.
Two months into his tenure as head of the $500 billion San Francisco AI company’s “for countries” program, Osborne told leaders gathered for the AI Impact summit in Delhi: “Don’t get left behind.” If AI isn’t rolled out, he said, they could end up with a workforce that is “less willing to stay put” because they may want to seek AI-enabled wealth elsewhere.
Osborne stated that the choice facing countries is between adopting artificial intelligence systems produced in the USA or China, such as Open Artificial Intelligence. The two superpowers have developed the most powerful artificial intelligence systems so far.
The fourth intergovernmental AI summit, hosted by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, follows meetings in the UK, Korea and France and focuses on using AI to benefit countries in the global south, for example through the adoption of more regional languages and the application of AI to improve agriculture and public health.
It also aims to improve security standards that some experts fear are inadequate to address the potential catastrophic risks posed by the most advanced AIs amid the White House’s opposition to bureaucracy.
“Many countries that are not the United States and are not the People’s Republic of China are actually facing two kinds of somewhat conflicting emotions at the same time,” Osborne said. “The first is Fomo: Are we missing this massive technological revolution? How can we be a part of it? How do we make our companies feel the benefits of it? How do we make our societies feel the benefits of it?”
He also said that these countries want to protect their national sovereignty while relying on powerful artificial intelligence controlled by the United States and China.
Osborne said: “There’s another kind of sovereignty, which is: don’t get left behind, because then you become a weaker nation, you become a poorer nation, you become a nation where the workforce is less willing to stay put.”
His comments came after White House senior AI adviser Sriram Krishnan emphasized the Trump administration’s desire for AI supremacy, telling the summit: “We want to make sure the world uses our AI model.”
He also dealt a fresh blow to the EU’s attempts to regulate artificial intelligence, saying he would continue to “fire up” against them.
“The EU Artificial Intelligence Law is not very conducive for an entrepreneur who wants to develop innovative technology,” he said.
But other technologists and AI leaders in Africa said relying on two AI superpowers is not so clear-cut.
“The idea that countries other than China and the United States can’t build great things, and we [hear] Mozilla’s president, Mark Surman, said this was actually a false proposition and continued: “This benefits companies in both countries.”
“For us, this is not a US or China issue,” said Kevin Degila, head of artificial intelligence and data at the Benin government’s digital agency. “We are Africans and our job is to cooperate [with each other] to build our own artificial intelligence.”
He said 64 languages are spoken in his country of 15 million, and the government agency is creating AIs for the public that combine both American and Chinese AI technologies and its own large language datasets.
“Anthropic and OpenAI are not reaching farmers,” he said.
Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation, Paula Ingabire, said her country was looking at partnerships with AI companies that “will be less and less necessary” and that Rwanda did not want to be “trapped in very dependent partnerships”.
Also speaking at the summit was former British prime minister Rishi Sunak, who now advises Anthropic and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s main rivals.
He called on political leaders to take bolder steps to lead the rollout of artificial intelligence, saying: “If you’re a prime minister, you can only do a few things that you do personally, and this should be one of them.”
“One of my concerns is that I think some political leaders think that AI will be an issue of tomorrow and accept that it is a matter of ‘action today’,” Sunak said. “AI needs to move to central responsibility before we can realize the benefits.”
