Is Asia's sovereign AI push an exercise in futility?

Governments concerned about sovereignty would be better off concentrating on infrastructure at the deployment level.

- Catherine Thorbecke

It’s a rallying cry that every government can get behind. As artificial intelligence (AI) seeps into more facets of society ~ including critical industries like defence, healthcare and financial services — countries want more control over the underlying technology.

There is also a fear that embedded values in the training data of foreign AI models can now spread at scale. This risks erasing cultural and linguistic nuances at a time when these tools are increasingly relied on by everyday citizens for search, drafting emails or completing homework assignments.

These sensitivities are especially prominent across Asia, where even the names of major bodies of water are heatedly contested. (OpenAl's ChatGPT still refers to the “Sea of Japan” instead of Seoul's preferred “East Sea”.)

Many smaller nations are also wary of having to pick a side and further entrench the supremacy of US or Chinese tech giants, which could lock in their dominance for decades to come.

But the dream is also a trap. Building foundation models - massive AI systems that are trained on enormous amounts of data — requires billions of dollars, scarce chips and vast engineering talent. Only a handful of global firms have succeeded. For most countries, this moonshot risks becoming an expensive exercise in futility.

South Korea recently launched an ambitious initiative to develop a foundation model. A public-private partnership is sponsoring a Squid Games-like competition among five local tech companies to create a domestic Al system that can compete with leading-edge rivals from the US and China.