It always seemed outlandish that in The Animatrix, the first AI city (01) was located in the Middle East…
If we had limitless time, it would be interesting to know how this happened. I guess the prehistory of it involved Saudi Vision 2030 (e.g. the desert city Noem), and the general hypermodernization of Dubai. You can see precursors in the robot Sophia getting Saudi citizenship in 2017, and the UAE’s “Falcon” LLM in 2023.
But the initiative must have come from the American side—some intersection of the geopolitical brain trust around Trump, and the AI/crypto brain trust around David Sacks. The audacity of CEOs who can pick a country on the map and say, let’s build a whole new technological facility here, combined with the audacity of grand strategists who can pick a region of the world and say, let’s do a huge techno-economic deal with our allies here.
There must have been some individual who first thought, hey, the Gulf Arabs have lots of money and electricity, that would be a good place to build all these AI data centers we’re going to need; I wonder who it was. Maybe Ivanka Trump was telling Jared Kushner about Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness”, they put 2 and 2 together, and it became part of the strategic mix along with “Trump Gaza number one”, the new Syria, and whatever they’re negotiating with Iran.
Sam Altman was publicly talking about this in 2024-02 (WSJ). I think this was the 1st time I’ve encountered the idea. Situational awaness I think was published ~4 months later, 2024-06 (https://situational-awareness.ai/ says “June 2024”)
It always seemed outlandish that in The Animatrix, the first AI city (01) was located in the Middle East…
If we had limitless time, it would be interesting to know how this happened. I guess the prehistory of it involved Saudi Vision 2030 (e.g. the desert city Noem), and the general hypermodernization of Dubai. You can see precursors in the robot Sophia getting Saudi citizenship in 2017, and the UAE’s “Falcon” LLM in 2023.
But the initiative must have come from the American side—some intersection of the geopolitical brain trust around Trump, and the AI/crypto brain trust around David Sacks. The audacity of CEOs who can pick a country on the map and say, let’s build a whole new technological facility here, combined with the audacity of grand strategists who can pick a region of the world and say, let’s do a huge techno-economic deal with our allies here.
There must have been some individual who first thought, hey, the Gulf Arabs have lots of money and electricity, that would be a good place to build all these AI data centers we’re going to need; I wonder who it was. Maybe Ivanka Trump was telling Jared Kushner about Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness”, they put 2 and 2 together, and it became part of the strategic mix along with “Trump Gaza number one”, the new Syria, and whatever they’re negotiating with Iran.
Sam Altman was publicly talking about this in 2024-02 (WSJ). I think this was the 1st time I’ve encountered the idea. Situational awaness I think was published ~4 months later, 2024-06 (https://situational-awareness.ai/ says “June 2024”)