Cultivating the next generation of AI innovators in a global tech hub

The world in all its complexity

Today, the rewards of AI are mostly enjoyed by a few countries in what the Oxford Internet Institute dubs the “Compute North.” These countries, such as the US, the U.K., France, Canada, and China, have dominated research and development, and built state of the art AI infrastructure capable of training foundational models. This should come as no surprise, as these countries are home to many of the world’s top universities and large tech corporations.

But this concentration of innovation comes at a cost for the billions of people who live outside these dominant countries and have different cultural backgrounds.

Large language models (LLMs) are illustrative of this disparity. Researchers have shown that many of the most popular multilingual LLMs perform poorly with languages other than English, Chinese, and a handful of other (mostly) European languages. Yet, there are approximately 6,000 languages spoken today, many of them in communities in Africa, Asia, and South America. Arabic alone is spoken by almost 400 million people and Hindi has 575 million speakers around the world.

For example, LLaMA 2 performs up to 50% better in English compared to Arabic, when measured using the LM-Evaluation-Harness framework. Meanwhile, Jais, an LLM co-developed by MBZUAI, exceeds LLaMA 2 in Arabic and is comparable to Meta’s model in English (see table below).

The chart shows that the only way to develop AI applications that work for everyone is by creating new institutions outside the Compute North that consistently and conscientiously invest in building tools designed for the thousands of language communities across the world.

Environments of innovation

One way to design new institutions is to study history and understand how today’s centers of gravity in AI research emerged decades ago. Before Silicon Valley earned its reputation as the center of global technological innovation, it was called Santa Clara Valley and was known for its prune farms. However, the main catalyst was Stanford University, which had built a reputation as one of the best places in the world to study electrical engineering. Over the years, through a combination of government-led investment through grants and focused research, the university birthed countless inventions that advanced computing and created a culture of entrepreneurship. The results speak for themselves: Stanford alumni have founded companies such as Alphabet, NVIDIA, Netflix, and PayPal, to name a few.

Today, like MBZUAI’s predecessor in Santa Clara Valley, we have an opportunity to build a new technology hub centered around a university.

And that’s why I chose to join MBZUAI, the world’s first research university focused entirely on AI. From MBZUAI’s position at the geographical crossroads of East and West, our goal is to attract the brightest minds from around the world and equip them with the tools they need to push the boundaries of AI research and development.