https://arab.news/nta9m
An international coalition of artificial intelligence labs and cloud providers just did something refreshingly practical: they pooled their compute resources to make Apertus, a Swiss-built open-source large language model, freely accessible to users around the world. The queries Apertus receives might be served by Amazon Web Services in Switzerland, Exoscale in Austria, AI Singapore, Cudo Compute in Norway, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre or Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure. Could this project point the way forward for international cooperation?
In the 20th century, international cooperation became practically synonymous with the rules-based multilateral order, underpinned by treaty-based institutions such as the UN, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. But great power rivalries and structural inequities have eroded the functioning of these institutions, entrenching paralysis and facilitating coercion of the weak by the strong. Development finance and humanitarian aid are declining as basic principles like compromise, reciprocity and the pursuit of mutually beneficial outcomes are called into question.
The retreat from cooperation by national governments has increased the space for other actors — including cities, firms, philanthropies and standards bodies — to shape outcomes. In the AI sector, a handful of private companies in Shenzhen and Silicon Valley are racing to consolidate their dominance over the infrastructure and operating systems that will form the foundations of tomorrow’s economy.
