Saudi Arabia Enters AI Race: Saudi Innovation Push
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The Saudi crown prince has launched a new company to develop AI technologies. This is very interesting as Saudi Arabia is a country with a ton of oil money traditionally, and they've been trying to essentially wean off of just having revenue from oil money for the last, you know, 20-ish years. And it's really been accelerating, I think, in the last five years. So one thing I've been...

quite impressed by you could say was Saudi Arabia's push for investment into AI technology since the very early days trying to become kind of like an AI hub they have a whole bunch of visa programs I have a lot of friends that are in tech that are living over there and so there's there's a lot of interesting a

A lot of interesting things, a lot of investment money going into space. And this in particular is a pretty impressive thing when the owner of the, or I guess the leader of the company, of the country, the prince is launching a new company. Now, I think in America, this is probably not very common that, you know, you would, you'd see like the president, for example, launching a company while they're the president. Trump, I know a lot of people probably criticize him for

a lot of his crypto and other businesses that he kind of launched in the campaign leading up to being inaugurated. I'm not sure exactly what the rules are. I don't think we're going to see him launch any companies while he's, you know, the sitting president. I think it's just less common that we will see that. American politicians have all sorts of scammy ways of making money. Don't get me wrong. But I think it's typically less seen as like they launch a

a company while being the president, it feels like you could really put your thumb on the scale of making sure your company is the winner. But in any case, I'm not criticizing Saudi Arabia. I just think it's different than what I'm typically used to seeing in America. There's a lot of interesting things with this company, though, in particular. I want to go over exactly what they're doing. And I think we might see some similar things out of other sovereign wealth funds in other countries. So

I'll break that all down. Before I do, I wanted to ask if you have ever had the opportunity to use the Quen AI model. It's a competitor to ChatGPT made by Alibaba. Very big company, very big model. Really interesting. Or if you've ever used Black Forest Labs for image generation or Ideogram. I've been so impressed by Ideogram for image generation. If not, go over and check out my own startup, AIbox.ai. We have a new playground we just released in beta that allows you to access the top

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discussion you had. So pretty cool. There is a link in the description. It's $20 a month, $19 a month, AI box.ai. All right, let's get into what's going on over in Saudi Arabia.

So this was originally reported by routers and essentially their crown prince, who is Mohammed bin Salam. He has a new company that essentially is going to manage AI technology, right? So it's not a very specific, like this is a chat should be T competitor. This is an X, Y, Z. It's kind of like a, you know, I think more traditionally we'd call this like a holding company in America. But it's pretty much top priority is any sort of

economic diversification inside of Saudi Arabia. So Donald Trump, he is traveling to Saudi Arabia this week. He's stopping at a bunch of places on a golf tour and he's expected to discuss AI a lot. So it's kind of interesting timing. It's like right before Trump goes there talking about AI, it's going to have a big international kind of media coverage. Evidently, you can imagine that this is going to be brought up. Probably this company is going to be brought up

And what's interesting is, you know, this is at a time where they're in Saudi Arabia, they're really trying to shift a lot of their revenue from other sources. They are right now the world's biggest crude oil exporter. And they're essentially have this what they call it like a...

economic and social transformation. They call it Vision 2030, which essentially is trying to get their whole company off of being completely dependent on oil by 2030. So they have five years left to go and they believe that AI is kind of one of their big pushes. And so that's why we're seeing, you know, some of these big plays in AI kind of making this. So

Over on TechCrunch, there is a breakdown of exactly what the company is going to be working on. And that's essentially going to be building out the company's AI infrastructure that includes construction of data centers. So...

It's not exactly like, oh, we're building like a software. It's more of an infrastructure play, right? So when you have something this big, you can start kind of comparing this to Sam Altman's like Stargate program that he's building for $500 billion over here in America. They just partnering with Oracle and SoftBank. It just seems like Saudi Arabia is trying to build their own version of this. And obviously when it comes to like these big infrastructure plays, you need a lot of money. You go straight to the top of the country.

which is kind of the crown prince and he's kind of building this. It's interesting because it's like the way Saudi Arabia works with, with kind of like the Royal family and there being a crown prince, like on the one hand, yes, the crown prince owns the company. And some people be like, Oh, that sounds like, I don't know, corruption or whatever. But like in reality, it's pretty much like a nationalized company because the crown prince can pretty much take as much money as he wants out of Saudi Arabia's crude oil reserve, uh,

you know, fund anyways and kind of spend it however he wants it. It's not like he needs more money per se. It's pretty much he's building infrastructure and, you know, building jobs and et cetera inside of his country. So,

It's kind of interesting because just this week, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are going to be attending an investment forum over in Saudi Arabia. Trump is going to be over in Saudi Arabia. So kind of all the big heads are over there. Everyone's going to be talking about AI. And this new company, which is called Humane,

H-U-M-A-I-N, is funded by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. So that fund has assets that it manages, which are worth around $940 billion. It's essentially part of the Crown Prince's, you know, get off of the oil program fund. So, you know, like $940 billion, that's almost a trillion dollars that's going to be funded by it. But it's interesting because it's like,

The Crown Prince is starting a company, but he also controls the trillion dollar investment firm that invests into projects and it's invested into this project. So I feel like it's more like a nationalized company at this point.

But we have seen a bunch of other American tech giants that have looked to this kind of PIF fund as a source of capital. Google, Salesforce are also working with PIF on some AI-related projects and investments. So this fund doesn't just invest into Saudi Arabian companies. It invests into American companies as well. But typically, that's going to be like Google building infrastructure, Salesforce infrastructure.

building out a sales team or building out like an office in Saudi Arabia. And that's kind of where we see this investing in things that typically can help Saudi Arabia. So very interesting. Saudi Arabia is putting a big focus on this. They have a big incentive and a lot of money going in this direction. I'll keep you up to date on everything they announce in relation to this as they start actually building out these data centers and building out some of this infrastructure, some of these projects. I think

Kind of the bottom line on this news story is like Saudi Arabia is serious. They're putting their money where their mouth is. They're backing, they're making big, big,

bold bets on the future of AI inside of their country. So I think that's very, very interesting. Again, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Make sure to check out AIbox.ai, my AI startup. Try out Quen, try out X's Grok models, try out Ideogram, try out Black Forest Labs, try all the different models on there. Let me know what you think. It is $20 a month and replaces a ton of different subscriptions you could have for the top 20 different AI companies. You get them all in one place. You can chat with them all in the same chat, which is kind of

Cool. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.