As new AI company DeepSeek made waves, experts at the annual Almaty Digital Forum warned about the need for countries to prepare for the AI revolution.
An earthquake struck the tech landscape just as a small army of experts, government officials, business people, and volunteers were putting the final touches to the programme and preparations for Kazakhstan’s seventh annual Almaty Digital Forum.
The sudden appearance of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek shook the most important tech event in central Asia, and in doing so raised questions about the future of humanity.
A lot has been said and written about the consequences of Chinese developers joining the ranks of leading AI tools, or wider AI solutions infrastructure. Most concerns had to do with data security.
This year’s Almaty Digital Forum focused on another aspect of DeepSeek’s shock arrival; the fact that, even if you relativise the claim of its developers that it only cost them $6 million (€5.8 million) to make it, it is still incomparably cheaper than its counterparts which declared $40-100 million (€38.5-96 million) investment.
Not all of the features of AI chatbots and their accounting practices are the same so one risks comparing apples and oranges but the bottom line is that a small team of dedicated experts, using open-source frameworks and existing technologies, can create AI solutions that fit many, or all, segments of end users.
And all of that at a cost that is affordable for most countries or big companies.
Little time was wasted at the Forum on the consensus that AI will be the driver of economic development in the future.
“The ones who achieve excellence in utilising AI will prevail. The role of AI is in augmenting the capability of people,” said Kaan Teryioglu, CEO of the VEON group.
“The sooner we make a doctor a better doctor, a teacher a better teacher, a small business owner a more successful one, the sooner we will have a return on our investment. The change is right here right now”.
AI solutions will be much less concentrated in the hands of tech giants and will be within reach of smaller developers who are ready to embrace them and invest in them, mostly in people who develop them.
“Developers and their compute budget are like gas, they occupy whatever the budget they’re given, and even if you constrain their budget you get similar results,” Nick Davydov, the founder of the US-based Gagarin Capital venture fund, said.
And, as more than one expert warned at the opening session of the Forum, AI may not mean human extinction but not being ready for it is not an option.
“The smaller costs will allow us to become even more aggressive in developing these technologies in the local languages,” Terzioglu added.
“If we do not create sovereign AI technologies in local languages, embracing local cultures and values, this will be the fastest assimilation and disappearance of cultures in history”.
High-level attendance at the Forum by the heads of governments of the major central Asian countries, including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, showed their determination not to be left behind.
“The global AI landscape is rapidly shifting from competition to collaboration. Tech industry leaders are joining forces to conduct joint research and openly share their findings for the common advancement of AI technologies. Kazakhstan must leverage this experience to develop its own solutions and foster international cooperation,” Olzhas Bektenov, Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, said.
The central Asia region certainly does not lack ambition. Zhaslan Madiev, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Digital Development, Innovation, and Aerospace Industry, announced that in 2030, the country will have trained no less than a million people in AI.
Of those, 800,000 will be high school and university students, and at least 90,000 civil servants. Much of the burden will fall on the educational system.
For instance, Kazakhstan undertook to launch an initiative – and a dedicated centre – called Alem.ai (from the Kazakh word ‘alem’ means “world” or “universe”), that is set to become a central hub for AI research, start-ups, and international collaboration but also integration of all AI-based services, such as AI education, e-government, and smart cities, to make them accessible and useful to citizens.
According to Madiev, the programmes within the initiative, which the government will finance, aims to boost Kazakhstan’s AI-driven exports to $5 billion (€4.8 billion) by 2029, spark a new wave of technological and economic growth, and position Astana as the intellectual capital of central Asia.
When it launches in the autumn of this year, Alem.ai will be, Madiev hopes, a catalyst for AI ecosystem development, helping to educate people and give them good working conditions. The aim is to train at least a thousand AI specialists.
Kazakhstan, like most other countries, can not do it alone, so it intends to attract 10,000 skilled professionals across various industries who will be instrumental in launching AI start-ups in this incubator.
The government is also intent on facilitating 10 major AI research projects in which local experts will be able to learn on the job.
The Ministry of Digital Development is already in discussions with global tech giants such as Telegram, TON, Tether, inDrive, and Google about establishing their offices at Alem.ai. Some of them are already members of Kazakhstan’s earlier IT hub “Astana Hub”.
Having in mind that the forum in Almaty was attended by more than 220 tech companies, that more than 80 local start-ups had their stands, and that it took hours after the opening to enter the forum because thousands of eager students were patiently queueing, the plans of Kazakh government may not be overambitious at all.
