AI in Abu Dhabi Bridging the Gap between Innovation & Implementation

[Music] thank you so much for that wonderful introduction very excited about this discussion we're going to be having for the next uh 25 minutes or so uh Ahmed and T thank you so much for being with us um as the previous panels this morning and and in the introduction we're talking about Ai and how we're moving from um what had been quite an esoteric distant technology for many of us to Something in the last two years with the Advent of geni as something perhaps most of us in this room are using every day but what's the impact going to be in terms of our economies in terms of Our Lives over the next few years as this technology applies to a wide range of sectors and data sets Beyond just the words that we write I'm very pleased to say that both Ahmed and tal bring with them you perspectives that talk about the leadership role of Abu Dhabi in this fast moving area and I think that's where we want to focus at the beginning of this discussion maybe I can come to you Ahmed first where does Abu Dhabi fit in the story of AI and in particular the last couple of years um firstly thank you so much for a wonderful introduction I thank all the attendees for spending uh time with us uh today um the story for us at least at top 71 started from our Inception in 2019 and I think I think what um a lot of people I'm sure realize but maybe don't identify with as much is that since we started in 2019 at top 71 we were sector agnostic we always uh didn't want to um uh you know crowd out any sector we wanted to be very open to um the type of startups that would be interested in joining The Hub 71 and the ababi ecosystem and since day one we always saw um AI um or startups that use AI as an enabling solution for their um uh for their businesses so it's really nothing uh new it's always been there obviously what's happening today is that you know you have an interface that's uh um user friendly people engage with the generative AI solution so now it's becoming more as a product or a solution uh here um now the growth spur that happened is also Testament to the great work that uh different Abu Dhabi entities including g42 and cor 42 has in have invested in the growth of AI infrastructure and and placing it really center stage of different um sectors that we have as um Abu Dhabi um and you know um I'm sure we we'll hand over to to talal in a second but I know for me it's sessions with talal sessions with other abui entities where I thought we were here in terms of AI but we're actually like way above here and that's really what fuels um our thinking as an ecosystem labor and our conviction actually that not only it's yes it's a cool thing that you see day to day but there's actually an opportunity for you to build uh hopefully globally leading businesses uh within AI out of Abu Gabi and and TOA the opportunity that that Ahmed is talking about I mean it feels that if core 42 and g42 are really uh Central to that opportunity and and bringing uh the access points to to Abu dhab no very much so and again also a thank you to the organizers for putting this together and inviting us to share a little bit about what G2 is doing and how we fit into this ecosystem uh and obviously uh Hub 71 has trailblazed in uh the attraction and the appeal factor for Abu Dhabi in uh the technology domain for years this is not a new thing or a new paradigm uh we're very lucky at g42 um we've been able to mimic the UAE and punching above our weight uh relatively small company in comparison to some of the bigger players in the industry but we've become a much more Global player we've got digital infrastructure deployed um exop flops capacity in uh superc compute in in in the US uh soon Europe and then here in the UAE as well that are currently available and that is the nucleus that allows us to manufacture and diffuse intelligence right this is it's it's very analogous to electricity right so you need the power plant in our case it's the computer infrastructure that's inclusive of the physical layer which in the g42 family is controlled by a company called kesna where we build data centers on a wholesale uh level and then the digital infrastructure which is where we play as core 42 providing the cloud compute flavors be it the private Cloud The Sovereign public cloud in in in partnership with Microsoft that we've also provided to um the customer personas like the regulated Industries and the public sector and then the AI compute the gpus and the AI accelerators that are necessary to um provide the enablement to the different companies either within the g42 family you've got pre-site um space 42 m42 on Healthcare CPX and others or to the extended ecosystem and hopefully now in this case as well the uh beneficiaries could be uh hub71 entrepreneurs so that's a that's where we're able to um play that role very analogous to a utility company and that's why we call it the intelligence grid on the g42 level which is what we're trying to build out not just locally but globally and so the the ecosystem encompasses a wide range of of topics that all fall under what's happening with AI so you mentioned energy which in one sense is is both a problem and an opportunity because you need a lot of energy to power the the cloud and the compute but also because of that it's likely that a Clean Energy Solution will be faster because of that need you know the demand is there um also we see that um beyond the infrastructure we also have the R&D that's needing to take place which I think maybe Hub 71 comes into the some of the uh startups that you've brought there probably are working at sort of as a hot bed area of Innovation do you have any color about you know some of the more exciting companies you want to name name check here yeah and that's one of the exciting things that uh I think it's a stone definitely untapped and something we um will definitely publicize a lot more but 20% of our startups are either are AI enabled or have ai as a service or a product and a couple of companies do stand out for example we have a company called base 2 that joined up 71 last year and what base do base 2 does simply is the um leverage AI to uh um develop uh um uh process manufacturing advice to different manufacturers could be any facility and they really skyrocketed they're doing really phenomenally well we have a couple of AI Discovery based uh startups now um that are operating out of the UAE and a common question they get and I sit in the sessions that they have with either investors or International audience they uh they get asked like why why are you in abudhabi out of all places and for them um it's the answer is quite simple is that well obviously the country and the Emirates is investing a lot within AI um every uh all the relevant uh Partners they meet are within um uh you know are within reach it's very simple through an ecosystem uh um as uh through an ecosystem like hub71 um and what's very important here and I don't think again something we say enough is regulatory agility tal knows this I know this this decision makers are one or two calls away doesn't mean that we can just go and just say you know change regulations overnight but we have the ears of important players that could uh move the needle when it comes to AI regulation here which I think is as an important of a um facet and an enaer as capital uh is and when you know startups come and identify this actually I can get my voice heard and this is a um ecosystem that will listen to our um um uh to our concerns to our what we are looking for it becomes way more appealing and the real um I'd say proof point of that is the adgm as a regulator our experience with them as Hub 71 their progressiveness their receptiveness to uh develop is really what's setting us aart I me I in this new era of AI it really underscores the the idea that you cannot succeed in a silo anymore there there needs to be cooperation across sectors governments um you know companies I I I feel that you know that's the experience that that that you're that core 42 and g42 are happening the number of partners that you're working with across Industries and and countries really speaks volumes to that idea that you can't succeed alone is is that the the kind of experience you're having absolutely I mean there's no way we could achieve the ambitious goals that we've set on our own if we had to build a lot of these things from scratch and we've tried in the past we've built a cloud from scratch a private Cloud which was a great experience and we've leveraged that even in our implementations today but it was not as scalable and inherently Limited in comparison to what we're able to achieve with Partners like what we're doing right now with Microsoft and we innovate on top of what they have as a platform but they've got obviously um Global reach and R&D dollars that date back multitude of years that allowed for them to get to a certain position that they're in so uh and similarly with Nvidia and with cerebrus and with qualcom and with AMD we're trying to build as much um optionality into our offerings for customers to maximize how they could leverage on the software side similarly we're seeing things on the we build our own model we have the Inception Institute of artificial intelligence as part of the g42 family where we've built the Jace Arabic language model but it's not mutually exclusive to you using other models which we support as well fine-tuning over uh opening eyes GPT or llama and um mistal and others and what we tend to do is find ways to build platforms that enable sovereignty to help with regulat workloads in in sectors that uh like healthcare and financial services or the public sector and energy where you need a level of sovereignty but also a layer of abstraction from the complexity in terms of figuring out what to choose so that you could focus on your core business as an entrepreneur you want to access compute you want to leverage gen but you're not necessarily certain which you don't know whether to use a Qualcomm accelerator for inferencing here or an Invidia GPU you don't know whether llama is going to give you the most inference economically uh uh achievable output um versus uh Mistral or Jace um and so we abstract that layer of complexity by providing apis and and and products that we developed like compass in the core 42 side to help enable you to focus more holistically on your value add to the customers by leveraging that compute infrastructure as well as the models that we have so I mean you talked us through there how it works in practice but also I'm hearing the names that you're mentioning like Nvidia and Microsoft and AWS and I think maybe we you know for the entrepreneurs in the room here um you know if you you're thinking you know how do I reach big names like that they're coming they're coming here I mean I think we can't take that for granted and we do sometimes because of the the the kind of track record of Abu Dhabi in the UAE over the last 25 years of being able to be a partner of choice a stable environment a stable landscape you mentioned the regulation so now we have it that in the fastest most exciting Arena the biggest names in the world are coming here and that's something not to be taken lightly I mean you know that's Testament to your work I assume Testament to Abu zabi's work the Emirates work I mean it's a there are a lot of macroeconomic factors that pave the path for a lot of these entities to identify the UAE and Abu Dhabi as the place to set up your business it's a Cosmopolitan place the rule of um there's a great uh obviously regulations safety security a favorable tax environment a very tolerant environment we have the first Ministry of Tolerance in the world there's a lot of these different factors that already make um Abu Dhabi such a great place to do your business you overlay that with a community a builder which is Hub 71 Community is very important for us it makes the path easy because these now are entities that just want to connect they have the shared vision of working towards a different goal and we keep drilling down in this specific case when it comes to working on AI Solutions it's all people with different backgrounds that uh have done different things but all have a shared vision of what AI can bring to the table so at you speak the same language and uh um here in a technology uh for uh front but I want to go back to a point you mentioned earlier about um you know how the nature of VC globally one of the things that differentiates Abu Dhabi and us having visited different ecosystems jurisdictions focused on the VC side be it Silicon Valley be it in Berlin be it London the VC and Technology space is very local uh you go to Berlin they tell you if it's not D speaking we w Really Don't think about it as VC or technology nor do we areested in it you go to Silicon Valley if it's not within a 5 kilometer radius they really don't take it as technology Abu Dhabi is probably one of the few places in the world where you're setting up a global business your mindset here is like because the market here is decent it's sizable uh you can get access to Partners but you're thinking um this is a uh Nexus where can I can access the world and this is when you're talking about the access to the compute access to the infrastructure you have infrastructure that's not just Abu Dhabi based but also International as well that people can leverage correct absolutely and that's that's key right because you do want to be able to have exportability for the things that you're building in ababi and the enablement there is something that allows companies to access that infrastructure elsewhere but more importantly and to ahmed's point I think you know the uae's always been known for leveraging its you know comparative and competitive advantages ever since uh the Pearl diving days um and then diversifying the economy away from hydrocarbon slowly into Financial Services initially with Investments and Sovereign wealth funds fast forward then mubadala came around in well even Dubai if you look at it as well in terms of Tourism and a Aviation and ports but then you look at what mubadala did in Abu Dhabi with industry and Manufacturing with structural composits for a Aviation with strata and investing in global foundaries very early on all these things were very intentional steps in that diversification Str stry that led to a point where it was an inevitable eventuality that we would get involved in uh Ai and Tech and become you know produce producti uh items around that that are exportable and that's kind of how we came to being we now consider ourselves a global company that happens to be born and headquartered in abudhabi because of the reach that we've had and the Partnerships that we've built and that is a very unique proposition and in terms of the comparative and competitive advantages it's interesting to see the the foresight so on the on the regulatory side I completely agree I think this Open Lab environment is What attracted g42 to exist in the first place because we were able to do things here be it in our genomics program be it in big data analytics and and um AI that other countries would only dream of and that was because of leadership and because of the ability to move with agility and and and um uh have regulations not um uh you know you didn't have to fit into existing regulations regulations could be designed around the new Innovative approaches and keep up keep Pace with technological Evolution but think back to 2007 when the demand side management for energy studies started to come out there was not even the foresight of the energy intensity of AI back then that would have necessitated nuclear it was really a decision based on Industrial capacity that was extrapolated to be needed by 2020 at the time and the current uh back then uh energy infrastructure and its trajectory not being a bble to meet that and so the idea was okay let's look at nuclear Renewables and find a diversified energy MK maintaining responsibility to the environment fast forward to now four nuclear reactors up and running extensible as well and the key ingredient for AI in my opinion today is energy it's the key bottleneck it is the one thing that absolutely is necessary for us to scale what we are seeing in intelligence manufacturing today be it generative AI in the traditional sense with the the language models or what we're increasingly seeing more of in reasoning which is the opportunity to develop new knowledge which then has profound impacts in terms of improving outcomes in in in medicine in energy transformation and other areas so energy being the bottleneck the UAE having that comparative advantage and the foresight that necessitated that buildout positions us extremely uniquely and that's why there is such an appeal to Abu Dhabi right now from all the big technology players in the world I mean you mentioned leadership and I think it's it's it's good for a moment to dwell upon that because you know going back to the Founding Father shik Zed and through the consistent uh strategy and and road map that even to now His Highness shik Muhammad bin z um and and the other leadership you know what you're going to get and I think increasingly in other regions we'll see how AI will be a political hot potato with data and ethics and we can be sure here that there is a kind of as you were saying a divers effect diversification goal a Prosperity goal how does AI feed into our Collective prosperity and that really ties into that so we know that we're not going to be sidetracked by some of the the the kind of thorn issues elsewhere which means that we you know we might not be in front now but we will be in the future if you talk a little bit about the next few years maybe and and and how you see that playing out for hub71 and Abu Dhabi yeah no I mean it goes without saying I think a common theme across not only this event but Carls event that how um uh people can forecast what um you know AI is how it's going to change the way we work um maybe I'm more extreme in that sense I really think it's going to be drastic changes um uh in shorter amount of times that uh than we supect and that that excites you the DraStic change well it makes it's making my life easier right now but I'm also like now investing time in the creative economy because I need to kind of spread my own skill sets uh but if think about what J GPT just just test today like you know from being able to mimic your style of communication to it can start even producing slides like listen my skill set growing up was all sorry during my career was doing slides so I was like if chat GPT starts doing it so I'm starting to Branch out into music and art you know just uh need to need something to cover um but it's definitely going to be a a sismic shift and you mentioned leadership and I I mean it's a a great seg and I'm sure will be in here but um His Highest KH Muhammad His Highest tun b z both have been um had I'd say a vision for this before we I even at least personally um see even and saw a s of it they had the foresight long ago today we're just living some we're probably living somewhere where they saw was coming and it's just OB the probably the vision they have set forth of what Abu Dhabi will how abui will be placed at Center Stage for AI is something that I don't think I can fathom yet and that's what excites me about doing this with hub71 is engaging with the partners is uh creating that path for us to see how it is we can be part of that uh story what excites you to are you as excited as as ahed I'm I'm extremely excited uh I think you know if you think about it it's hard to sometimes fully appreciate the potential of where things are going when living on an exponential curve because when you look back it doesn't seem like it's been exponential but when you look forward and you start seeing the inklings of um what's coming in AI um you're looking at these reasoning models like I said earlier and and you're starting to see the ability to not just have probabilistic or um statistical based approaches where the larger the data sets that go are ingested the more compute you throw at it the scaling law isn't failing and will continue to produce results that are seemingly um not just human in conversational ability but but smart but it is limited to what you ingest thinking and reasoning is a completely different Dynamic I think people are underappreciated it like you know one of our companies m42 we have the largest genomics program globally that we are uh executing for the Department of Health 1.2 million UAE Nationals uh is the target whole genome sequencing at a 30X resolution long read and short read what's the value there you take that data and then you add to it the phenotypical data because m42 also has where is it right there Cleveland Clinic and other clinics as well and you're able to then put that together and start to understand the genetic predisposition someone might have have those snapshots in time combined with it in terms of your EMR records or CT scans blood tests Etc and you can conceive of a world where you know fiser astrazenica and all these other Pharma companies can do drug discovery on that um you can have Precision medicine tailored to the efficacy of your body rather than something that's more generic um speed up clinical trials have preventative care really go from sick care to healthare and that's why it's called mad health or what's called mad health and is m42 Health not healthare you that's as as our the chairman of the do says it's the 80% of what's required for you to prove your health outcome not the sick care which is longevity and living longer and being happier and better well-being as opposed to just treatment for when you're ill essentially exactly and that's where AI as an output of having the compute infrastructure that can help you process the data and analyze it and derive insights as well as the cloud infrastructure to store that significant amount of data and then the speed and the ability to create trusted compute environments so that the likes of other countries can leverage that data set to do their research in a way that's also Sovereign because nobody wants their genomics data on a public cloud unchecked and that's what we sold for with the relationships like the one we have with Microsoft and others so so these are some of the question because you know AI throw up a lot of questions and and Abu Dhabi is searching for the answers and and and really I think that's um what can give us a lot of uh excitement about the future because if we can come up with our own answers we're not just relying on you know China the US Europe wherever it is we we kind of control our own destiny and and and it seems that's the feeling we have right now wouldn't you say we definitely are Paving the path for um I'd say like because we mentioned the importance of Partners and US U you know working with a different uh jurisdictions economies across the world everyone plays a role right AI is a global solution that everyone will have the best interest there are advances yeah it's funny mention especially that us and China because I think the economist article that came out last year or earlier this year I fight three locations to um or three economies three uh places that where AI is really going to thrive that is the China us and ababi specifically um so we definitely are at a place where we'll definitely have to tap into and leverage both and were're one of the few places that could would be able to do this uh get the both of best of all worlds across the boat at the same time PVE a path for our well actually not p a path uh you just heard it from uh talal um we're already doing it uh we're are pre Advanced when it comes to uh different um facets of the AI Journey um what we will be able to unlock over the next few years is now a more uh tailored approach for companies to be able to think well no now instead of going to China and the US um I can do it out of Abby so I mean whatever problem you want to solve you can do it from here with the infrastructure with the regulation with the environment and and also uh the the kind of uh AI positive uh at spere I mean within g42 and core 42 I'm sure you feel it every day that you are AI positive but it isn't necessarily a sentiment that's shared everywhere but do you feel that that is something that over the the coming time you can prove to people that they should feel optimistic and and and excited about AI whatever happens yeah very much so especially since it feels like g247 more so than g42 but uh more importantly and to your point about the answer 42 is the answer and that's kind of where we drew our inspiration I don't know if anyone here who's read The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy yeah so that's literally where we derive our inspiration 42 being the answer but more importantly it's it's how it's asking the right questions right so we have all these um tools that are going to help us augment human Ingenuity that can help us answer questions but we need to know what questions to ask to answer right and and that's where I think we spend a lot of our energy and our time thank you both uh for dynamic insightful discussion in this as you pointed out wonderful cluster that we have here of finance and health and and all the other sectors and thank you all for being here this morning please join me in thanking our guests on the panel thank you [Music]