00:00George Yeo is the former Singaporean foreign minister. He was also the Minister for Information and the Arts.
00:07It's wonderful that China has made its large language models open source.
00:11In fact, China is making a huge contribution to global public good here.
00:17And once the large language models are available, then what you need is to ensure infrastructural development.
00:25This will take time, of course, but we are just on the threshold of a new age.
00:34So I would not be in a panic. The greatest impediment is not infrastructure.
00:41It is the inability of social systems to manage this new technology and to manage the new inequalities proceeding from
00:49this new technology.
00:51And countries which experience Luddite reactions will be held back politically.
00:59If you look at the Industrial Revolution, it created a whole socialist, communist reaction against capitalist industrialization.
01:11And reshape the course of human history. AI will do that to us. It will write a new chapter in
01:18mankind's political history.
01:19And the evolution of that political history will be much more difficult than the development of technology itself.
01:30So what will it take for this proposed World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization to become a truly inclusive global platform?
01:42There must be trust. There must be trust. There must be a sense that while China convene the meeting, it
01:49is not seeking to lead it or to control it,
01:53but to allow itself to be shaped by a global conversation.
01:59That sets it in a different position for America, which sees AI as a competitive advantage for its companies, for
02:11them to create wealth for very few people, really,
02:17and to monopolize the technology so that more profits can be made.
02:22So when China took the decision to go open source, it was seminal, it was a very dramatic fork along
02:35the road to the future.
02:37And China is saying, look, what you can gain from the technology is much, much more than what companies specializing
02:45in AI can make in terms of profit and valuation.
02:49And our first priority must be to spread the benefits of this technology wide into the furthest corners of the
02:57economy,
02:58in China first, and therefore spilling out of China into, well, countries like Singapore.
03:05That's a different approach from the approach taken by Silicon Valley, which is a little too infected by a God
03:12complex that we've discovered this technology is going to change the world.
03:17So we have the knowledge, and one way or another, we will have your data and you'll be, without quite
03:26saying so, under my control.
03:28I think that would be a darker world.
03:30It's better if we say, look, let's share.
03:33If there are problems, address those problems.
03:36If there are people who misbehave, we'll find a way to sanction them and to prevent further misbehavior.
03:44But you need trust, it needs time.
03:46It cannot be done overnight.
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