Tag Archives: AI and Saudi Arabia

AI or Just Bots: the Truth about Artificial Intelligence

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Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that artificial intelligence is actually thinking like humans do…This fuels narratives about a future in which AI takes over the economy, leading to heightened insecurity for all of us while providing cover for companies that might be laying off workers for other reasons. It leads us to accept as true answers that are frequently made up or incorrect, even when we are repeatedly told that chatbots can’t stop delivering this kind of misinformation…Our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments… We have evolved to view linguistic fluency as a proxy for intelligence, and engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness. Builders of AI tools lean in to this deliberately. The humanlike qualities of chatbots are a calculated effort by designers and engineers to make AI more useful, but also more compelling and stickier [i.e. addictive]—just like social media.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman… warned that today’s seemingly conscious AIs [consists of a bunch of] highly accelerated information processors. “These systems are not waking up,” he wrote. “They are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data.” He recommends a solution: “Developers must actively engineer the illusion of consciousness out of the products.”…

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and even inanimate objects, says Ayanna Howard, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and a robotics….Humans’ trusting nature makes sense for social creatures who must cooperate with members of their own tribe to survive. With AI and robots, however, this same tendency leads us to trust any system that appears to listen, understand and want to help, a phenomenon Howard calls “over-trust.” Today’s AIs are engineered to actively induce us to over-trust them, she adds. They do this by behaving in ways that are friendly and helpful, mimicking us through memory and personalization.

Excerpt from Christopher Mims, Why Even Smart People Believe AI Is Really Thinking, WSJ, Mar. 20, 2026

The Battle to Block Access to AI

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The U.S. is imposing some of its strongest measures yet to limit Chinese advances in artificial intelligence, requiring companies to get government approval to export certain information about their AI models and set up large AI computing facilities overseas.

The rules, in January 2025, are a final push by the Biden administration in a yearslong effort to use export controls to stem China’s advances in chip-making and AI, and they have sparked a backlash from companies including Nvidia. The rules impose caps on how many advanced AI chips can be exported to certain countries and require a license to export the data that underpins the most sophisticated AI systems.

Strict sales restrictions on these chips are already in place for China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries, and the new rules carve out exemptions for a group of 18 close U.S. allies and partners. These include countries such as the U.K., France and Germany, a senior administration official said. But a broad category of more than 120 other countries, including U.S. allies in the Middle East and Asia, are set to face new hurdles in setting up huge AI computing facilities.

While the impact of the rules isn’t yet clear, they threatened to limit sales of AI chips from Nvidia, which has built a large business out of satisfying demand for AI infrastructure in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Company officials said they expected to bring in almost $10 billion of revenue last year from so-called “sovereign AI,” where countries around the world increasingly see AI computing facilities as national assets.

Under the new rules, companies that produce AI models—the likes of OpenAI and Google—would need export licenses to send the “weights” attached to those models to many foreign countries. Model weights are the secret sauce in advanced AI systems like ChatGPT, a series of digital knobs that fine-tune their performance.

Excerpts from Asa Fitch and Liza Lin U.S. Targets China With New AI Curbs, Overriding Nvidia’s Objections, WSJ, Jan. 13, 2025