The past two years of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Have been like science fiction, but now needs to move to the next stage, namely agentic ai that can work for us while being completes. Meanwhile, AI Threatens to Undermine Our Autonomy, even providing the ability to clone our Identities and personalities.
That was some of the views put forward at this week's leap 2025 tech show in Riyadh, saudi arabiaAt which the kingdom announced almost $ 15bn worth of planned investment in ai.
The announsement came in the context of Saudi Arabia's Multi-Year Plan Vision 2030Which seeks to diversify the country from its history from its history dependence on oil production reviews.
Saudi Arabia is Placing Big Bets on it, Datacentre Capability and Ai in Particular, with the Latter a Massive Focus of the Show and An Agenda Packed Out With Discussions Around Discussions of Ai and its ly agentic ai,
Projects Announced in AI Included A $ 1.5BN Agreement Between Ai Infrastructure Provider Groq and Aramco Digital-A Subsidiary of Long-Establed State Oil Company Aramco-to expand ai-deed Rastructure and cloud computing. Also, Saudi State-Owned Manufacturing Congress Alaat and Lenovo Committed $ 2BN to Estabish an advanced manufacturing-Including SEMICONDUCTORES-and Technology Center that Integrates AI and Robotics.
Others inclined google's new ai-driven digital infrastructure and the launch of a computing cluster, and Qualcomm Announcing Availability of its Arabic Large language Model (llm).
The kingdom also revised that $ 42.4bn had been investment in Technology-Related Infrastructure Since 2022,
These inclined databricks investment $ 300m in integrated platform as a service (paas) for developers in ai tools; Sambanova Committing $ 140M to Build Advanced AI Infrastructure; SAlesforce Investing $ 500m to Develop Hyperforce and Enhance Cloud Capabilites for Regional Customers; And Tencent Cloud Allocating $ 150M to Establish the Middle East's First Ai-Powered Cloud Region.
With a couple of years of generative ai behind us, most notable in the form of chatgpt, a big theme at the event was the next stages in ai developments and dishes of decisions Longer-TERM EFFECTS on Humanity.
Of the former, agentic ai is touted as one of the next big things in ai. Here, The Challenge is to move beyond ai as something we seek out and use, but instead work as a barely noticed adjunct to human activities that operates for us.
That was a view expounded by yaser al-honiizan, CEO of the National Center for Ai in the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA).
“The promise of ai is that it will be in everything that we do and we touch every day,” said al-Onaiz. “It needs to be invisible. It cannot be in your face – it should be listening to you, undersrstanding you and doing things based on your opinion. “
Al-Onaizan said the new generation of models is about doing something on your behalf. For example, justad of just giving you information about flights, it can go on and reserve flights, for example, or make a hotel reservation for you.
But some speakers warned of the threats posd by ai. Among these was lambert hogenhout, Chief of data, analytics and emerging technologies at the united nations. He said ai brings huge potential for vastly multiplied productivity and for large numbers of people to work in better ways, but warned that it also batters threats to Human Autonom Purpose and Connection to Society.
He said: “We want to make sure ai increasing connections, that we are not eliminated. That it makes a Good Society. The Society where a number of people are excluded is not going to work. It will create problems. “
Elsewhere, Attendes focused on how to Gain Business Value from Ai. This included Aiden Gomez, CEO of Canadian Company Cohere, Which Specialies in Use of llms in Enterprises.
He said: “A generative model is kind of like a cpu – it's a General Piece of Technology. You could deploy it inside any vertical for any purpose, like a cpu. But, in and itself, just ovening a cpu isn’t valuable. It's what you build with it that is valuable.
“So, for that piece, you do have to be technical. You need to be a developer, to be accommodated to build somebing on top of this model to create value on the other side. “