When do you feel optimistic（乐观的） about the future? You feel optimistic about the future when you believe that the cohort of government leaders that are meeting the charge are enlightened（启发）, are aware and have the right amount of humility（谦卑） to understand when they don't know something and they tap（轻敲） into the private sector（部门）. India possesses（控制） that, right? And I've seen it. The world's first Minister（部长） of Artificial（人工的） Intelligence, he was recently listed as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential（有影响的） people in artificial（人工的） intelligence, alongside（ 在旁边） Elon Musk and chat GPT creator（创造者） Sam Altman. Please give a very warm IGF welcome to His Excellency Omar Al-Alama.

  How are you? Nice to see you. So, Your Excellency, I asked chat GPT to write a haiku about you. Is it okay if I read it? Please, yes. Omar guides the code, UAE's AI beacon（烟火）.

  Innovation（创新）'s path? Not bad. I think humans still are not at risk to be replaced by AI. That's the best it could do. There's not too many syllables（音节） there in a haiku. So, Your Excellency, you said something in your interview with Time Magazine.

  I want to quote. You said, "When humanity（人性） used to depend on coal and wood fire for energy, there wasn't any Minister of Energy. When it became paramount（极为重要的） to ensure（保证） that energy production and energy distribution（分发）, every single government in the world has appointed（任命） a Minister（部长） for Energy." You said the same happened with telecommunications（电讯） and you believe that AI is at that same level now. So, give me an example of something that you've seen just in the last few weeks that makes（使） you believe that statement is true. I think that's a very important question and the reality is we don't need to look at the past few weeks. Let's look at the past few years.

  The honest truth is each and every single one of you, everyone in this room and most people beyond（在…的那边） this room cannot live without artificial（人工的） intelligence. All our questions are being answered by AI. All our content is being fed to us by AI. Even our shopping today, if you shop digitally, it's an AI engine that drives that for you. If anyone, whether it's in the UAE or another country, said that we're going to stop or not allow you to use these tools, how will it impact your quality of life? It's going to have a detrimental（有害的） impact on your quality of life.

  This is the fact of the matter. That's why countries like India, for example, went through the non-conventional（符合习俗的） path of creating its own platforms, which I think is very smart and really the way that many countries of that size need to go. Now, in that sense, AI is driving the economy, AI is impacting society and AI is today the technology that is enabling（使能够） people to go into the 21st century in the right way and governing（统治） it in the right way, regulating（管制） it in the right way and developing certain forms of the right way is really the only way to go. The UAE has worked（使工作） on developing its own large language model. As you know, we have Falcon（[动](猎鸟用的)猎鹰） and JACE. Today, that's our equivalent（等价物） to ChatGPT or Llama, for example, from Facebook.

  And they are open source tools because we do believe that all governments need to look at this seriously and we need to lead the charge as the UAE. I want to come back to some of those Arabic large language models in a moment. You were on stage recently with the Indian Minister for AI, a great friend of IGF, Ravi Chandrasekhar, at the UK's AI summit（最高点） recently. I wonder when you think we'll see an AI minister in every country in the Middle East and Africa? I don't want to be the person that people point back to and say, you made that statement and you were wrong. So let's look at it this way.

  2017, when I was appointed, it was very lonely. So if we had the convention（习俗） for ministers（部长） of AI, I'd be talking to myself. Today, there are at least two other ministers of AI in the world. So there's one in Spain and there's another one in the UK or an equivalent to that in the UK. I do believe that we are going to see it. The issue is the actual（实际的） bureaucratic process in certain governments to appoint（任命） a minister（部长） for a new mandate differs between country to country and region to region.

  I have no doubt that this is going to be the most important thing that governments need to deal with and tackle（处理） in the future. However, I cannot give you a specific timeline. If it were up to me, I think we're already beat. So if it were up to me, I'd say the clock is ticking and we need to see a lot more of them very, very soon. Interesting. Okay（好）.

  So obviously trust（相信）, fear are some of the issues that have been bubbling（冒泡） around when we talk about AI on a scale（刻度） of one to 10, where one is I'm worried AI will enslave us all and 10 is we have nothing to fear. Welcome our robot overlords. Where do you put yourself? I would put myself as five. Okay. All right.

  Why is that? Because I can't afford to be anything lower or higher. Because look, my job as a government official（官员） is to be in the middle, dead center. Try to look at all the opportunities and grasp（抓紧） them and try to look at all the challenges and regulate（管制） against them. If anyone answered this question and they were a government leader looking at this mandate（(书面)命令） and they said anywhere under five or above five, I think you should be concerned（涉及）. All right.

  So if you imagine a timeline where perhaps the end of it is when computers, superhuman AI, we have AGI or beyond, artificial general attention intelligence matching or maybe exceeding（超越） human intellect（智力）. And the beginning of the timeline is now. How fast do you think we'll get there? When do you think we'll see superhuman intelligence? So the catch（捕捉） here or the thing that we need to look at is what do we define as intelligence first and second, what capabilities（才能） are we defining here? If the capabilities are maths equations（方程式） for example, then not just artificial intelligence, computing is already better than us at that.

  So the ability to a calculator or a scientific calculator or whatever you want to call it can do much better than most humans in the world, probably any human in the world. And if we look at certain tests that we put for human beings（存在）, like for example the bar for legal associates and people working in the law field or for example the medical exam, I think that these systems can do much better than human beings and they might be seen as very, very smart. Does that mean that they're better than humans is a question. My view is I tend to believe that AGI is still far away. How many years? Well, it depends on which timeline you're talking about.

  The UAE's timeline every year. So we as a country live in dog years. So what we achieve in one year, most countries achieve in seven. That's what I see. Not to be humble（卑下的）. Well, I try to stay tracked（ 跟踪）.

  So the answer here is, if I tell you 10 years, the 10 years in our timeline might be 50 years or 70 years in other timelines. We believe that it's at least 10 years out. We really plan our years, so we have for example a vision（视） 2071 for the next 50 years or so. And I think AGI is still in the horizon（地平线）. I cannot see it coming closer. However, people working in the field have a better view, so we are engaging（使从事于） with them continuously to better understand what's happening.

  Will we have narrow purpose of artificial intelligence that is going to really either wreak havoc（ 大破坏） or create incredible opportunities for people in the coming two to three years? Absolutely. And our job is to engage as countries to ensure that people are not disrupted（破坏） in India or the UAE or in the US or other places. Because what people forget is that disruption（ 动乱） anywhere is, I think, negative for everyone. Because at the end of the day, we are connected. Whether we are connected through borders, whether we are connected through a digital landscape（风景）, or whether we are connected by our humanity, we need to ensure that we can work together.

  It's been quite a week in artificial intelligence. Sam Hoffman, CEO of ChatGBT, was in. He's out. He's back in. And beyond that drama, there's actually something that's quite important here, and it's the issue around safety and how the board of ChatGBT looked at safety. I heard a version of this story, which in short was that it was the capitalists（资本家） versus（对） the catastrophists.