Amid the global race for artificial intelligence (AI), Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday denounced the West’s “monopolistic domination” over these new technologies, tools that he said are “wiping out Russian culture.”
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“Some Western search engines, as well as some generative models, so to speak, often work very selectively and biasedly and do not take into account Russian culture, or sometimes even simply ignore it and simply erase it,” Vladimir Putin said during the interview at an AI forum in Moscow.
“The monopolistic control of these foreign developments in Russia is unacceptable, dangerous and inadmissible,” he sharply criticized.
In recent months, the Russian president has called on his government, major domestic companies and the Russian scientific community to jointly participate in the development of national programs that can compete with Western artificial intelligence tools such as the American chatbot ChatGPT.
But the start of the army’s offensive in Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists the following fall forced thousands of highly qualified employees in the high-tech and IT industries to go abroad and abandon the national market.
In parallel with the military offensive in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has initiated an ultra-conservative cultural change in Russia in recent years, which is directly directed against the ideals represented in the West.
Given the “radical” changes brought by the arrival of AI in the economy, the Russian leader on Friday called on Russian companies to “stay at the forefront of technological progress” despite the delays that have already accumulated.
He also announced that a government plan for “a national strategy for the development of AI” would be presented soon.
Last April, Sber, one of Russia’s leaders in new technologies, launched its own conversational robot, joining the global race for these AI-based tools.
In September, the jewel of Russian technology, Yandex, launched YandexGPT 2, the latest version of its conversation robot.