March 5, 2025 • 31 mins
Bradley Hope is a journalist, author and co-founder of Project Brazen, a narrative non-fiction production studio. His piece in Wired, ‘A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI,’ outlines how one Gulf royal – Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan – came to control vast sums of sovereign wealth. Hope sits down with Oz to discuss Sheikh Tahnoun’s early obsession with AI, his path to becoming the UAE’s national security advisor and the country's role in the global AI race.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Bradley Hope.
Hope is an investigative journalist and author. He's the co
(00:21):
founder of Project Brazen, a narrative nonfiction production studio based
in London and Singapore, and before starting his own journalism company,
Hope covered the Arab spring from Cairo, Beirut, and Abu
Dhabi and led investigations as a financial reporter at The
Wall Street Journal. He also co wrote the book Billion
Dollar Whale, about the Malaysian businessman Jolo. We asked Bradley
(00:44):
to join us from his studio in London to discuss
his recent piece in Wired Irresistibly, titled a Spymaster Shake
controls a one point five trillion dollar fortune. He wants
to use it to dominate Ai. So who is the
spy master?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Shaikh So? The spine master is Abu Dhabi. Royal Shaik
Taknun Benzayed al Nahyan.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Shak Tarnun is one of the twenty odd sons of
the United Arab Emirates first president. But back when Hope
started paying attention to this shadowy figure, he didn't play
a major role in government.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
He was kind of this minor real estate tycoon with
Harbyish businesses.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
When Hope moved to Abu Dhabi soon after the two
thousand and eight financial crisis, one of the things he
covered for a newspaper was real estate. The country was
in the midst of a building boom, and the craze
spread to the island surrounding Abu Dhabi, including a place
called Riem Island. Hope soon discovered that Reem Island was
actually Shake Taknun's personal project.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
He wanted it to be kind of a little mini
manhattan next to Abadabi. It was like a building site,
you know. It was just tons of different projects rising up,
and even today it looks sort of half built. And
so I was always very interested in him because he
had this kind of diletantish thing about him that was
kind of irresistible. And over the years I watched as
(02:05):
he just rose higher and higher in the power structure
of Abu Dhabi.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Today, Sheikh Tagnun is the United Arab Emirates National Security Advisor,
the intelligence chief to one of the world's wealthiest and
most surveillance oriented small nations. Taknun is also the younger
brother of the Yue's President, Mohammad bin Zayed al Nayan.
Outside his duties as the national security Advisor, Taknun has
(02:30):
official control over much of Abu Dhabi's vast sovereign wealth.
According to Bloomberg News, he directly oversees a one point
five trillion dollar empire. To put that in perspective, that's
more cash than just about anybody on the planet. And
as you might expect of a spymaster, Sheikh Taknun is
a mysterious figure, but over the years, Bradley Hope has
(02:54):
been able to make enough connections in the UAE to
learn more about this extremely influential politician and diplomat, a
man who seems to be transforming the small but wealthy
country into a major AI power. You described him as
one third Gulf royal, one third fitness obsessed tech founder,
and one third bond villain. Can you talk a little
(03:16):
bit about those three legs of the stool of Tachmoon.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Well, I mean, so the bond villain part, you could
call it slightly unfair of me, but I find him
to be kind of giving off that vibe. He always
wears sunglasses indoors or outdoors, and it's because of a
light sensitivity, according to people I spoke to, but it
still gives him a James Bond villain a kind of feeling.
He commands this obscured network of companies that are all
(03:44):
involved in different types of espionage, and he has his
fingers in so many places. Like on one hand, he's
got all these AI companies. He's really mixed up in China.
He is a big investor in Israel. Under the normalization
of UAE Israel, he's kind of still the spymaster stuff.
He's always been obsessed with mixed martial arts and jiu
(04:05):
jitsu and has really become like this major patron of
the sport in the whole world. He flies over the
best sportsman in that sport and they come and train
with him and spend time with them. And I spoke
to a few of those guys and they said, you know,
he's just a kind of a fitness freak. He eats
one meal a day, he's exercising for two hours per day.
(04:25):
You know, he really believes in longevity, and you know,
I'm guessing that he probably takes like a hundred supplements
a day, you know, that kind of stuff. He's a
very interesting character. And then once you start studying the
Gulf royals, you really get to see what happens when
interesting characters are given access to resources, they just become
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
There's a great quote in your piece which is nearly
every story about royalty in the Gulf is a story
about succession, about paternalistic families trying to ward off external
threats and internal rivalries that crop up when inherited power
is up grabs. How is that relevant to understanding tachmoon Well,
I think that this has been something I spent a
(05:07):
lot of my journalistic career on, which is being fascinated
by these modern monarchies.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's no real monarchy in the world except for the Gulf.
You know. These are true old fashioned monarchies where all
power is derived from these families, and they can make
huge decisions, and they can direct the entire country's wealth
towards achieving those goals. There's no technical mandate, like they
can't be voted out. But on the other hand, there's
(05:35):
a lot of brittleness that is created by generational transfer
of power, so by the time it gets to the
third generation, it's almost always getting very fraught. Behind every decision,
there's also a bit of maneuvering and trying to establish
what's my power going to be and if my brother
were to pass away, where do I stand, and all
that sort of.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Thing, and it's my understanding. This is almost exactly what
happened to Takmoon in twenty twenty two. His brother Mohammed
Benzaied became the president of the UAE, and shortly after that,
Muhammad named his own son as successor, and so am
I writing thinking there was kind of a need to
appease Taknun, who may have seen this decision as a snub.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Well, I'd say Tartannun became very ambitious over time, and
in the case that this younger son of Mahma Benzaid
became the crown prince, there needed to be some sort
of a trade with Toatnun to make him happy about
that arrangement, And essentially the deal was that he would
get much greater control over the investments of the country.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
There's a detail in the story that I love about
how Taknun's sort of interest in technology began as a
personal fixation on the collaboration between man and machine. Can
you speak a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So back in the early two thousands when Shake Tatnun
started building this conglomerate called the Royal Group. Essentially, it's
a series of holding groups, which hold holding groups, which
hold companies, which hold further companies. One of the things
he got obsessed with was chess as a game that
he liked to play personally, and he became very interested
in how to invest in chess computers. This was the
(07:14):
era of Garry Kasparov playing against the Deep Blue, and
so he found an interesting I believe, Austrian computer scientists,
and it basically bankrolled that guy to develop a chess
computer called Hydra. And the Hydra was especially well known
during that period for this kind of man plus machine
(07:35):
style of playing chess. And so you would be able
to you as a human were there using it kind
of like how we use AI today. You use it
as a tool to play against a player.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
As it suggests a range of moves and you pick
the most optimal one or.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, to some extent, I think to a large extent,
it tells you the next move and you just kind
of executed it. Yeah, So he was playing chess online
so much that the computer scientist was like wondering when
he was going to get offline because he needed to,
you know, tinker with the code and stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Incredible. I mean, if you'll often talk about the Middle
East as a chess board, it's one of the kind
of hoary analogyes, for thinking about the Middle East. But
I mean, do you see something in Technom's fascination with
chess and desire to win in chess that is a
kind of key to understanding how he's approached his own
rights to power.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I mean, to some extent, A country like the
UAE is in a very interesting sort of precarious position
compared to some other bigger country. It's pretty small. It's
a country of I think it's something like six million residents.
Of those, more than a million are actual emiratis, so
it's a very small population. The country is famously full
(08:45):
of expats, so there's no way that they could ever
go to war with another country. As a country, they
really have to be kind of strategically allied at the
same time as that they don't want to just be
a pawn of the West or of America. So they're
in things like developing a stronger relationship with China. So
I do think someone like Toatnoon and someone like the
(09:05):
President Muhammad Bin de Sided figuring out how how they
fit into the world is is a very strategic question
for them.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I want to kind of chart Technolog's progress from eccentric
with interest in chess and robotics to spy master to
this kind of current AI investor at large. But maybe
we can start with with his kind of becoming a
spy master. How did that start to happen? How did
it start to show up?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, I'll caveat by saying it's very hard to know
everything about these people because they don't give interviews, nobody
talks around them in an official capacity. You know, it's
a very difficult place to report on, and I'm only
able to do so because I've lived in the region
and i just developed enough relationships where I'm able to
(09:53):
do that. But my hypothesis around how he became a
spymaster is actually focused on this digit because when he
was running Royal Group and focusing on Rheam Island and
not really playing a huge role in sort of the
strategic part of the country. They started having some questions
about how do they use technology to enforce essentially a
(10:16):
police state because the UAE, like I said before, is
kind of fragile. It's kind of a spy's paradise because
all the countries in the world are there, and so
they're all spying against each other, and there's an element
of danger and risk to their whole positioning. If there
was a bomb that exploded in Dubai or something, that
would be hugely problematic for the country. So they were
(10:36):
thinking about, well, we can't have like police on every corner.
We're not China, we don't have that size of a population,
so we need to use other techniques, and technology was
the answer, you know. And so I think top Nune
just had a much greater appreciation of technology and that
was enough to make him start to play a crucial
role in how do we use technology for domestic security
(10:58):
and then overtime for external threats as well. And so
there was like a pro democracy activist in the UAE,
and famously, when they figured out how his computer had
been hacked, they traced it back to the Royal Group
there was like a connection in the kind of digital trail,
So that's why I have that hypothesis. And then also
(11:18):
there's an element of his personality which is useful too,
which is he doesn't seem to me in all my
reporting to be a judgmental person or a dogmatic person
at all, which is probably useful to be as a spymaster.
So whenever, for example, secret meetings happened, he would be
often the person that would go, and it wouldn't be
like a news item for him to go, versus if
(11:41):
his brother went. The kind of effective ruler, and he
seemed to have a kind of cool temper because the
UAE was in this very pitched, never physical, but very
heated battle with Qatar, this other little island nearby, and
eventually when they reached a deal mostly broke good by
Saudi Arabia, it was only tak Noon who would go
(12:03):
and meet the quitaris. So I think that's kind of
why he eased into the role to some extent.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
What was some of the other kind of signature cyber
espionage programs and did you have any experience of them
in the period you were living in UAE.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I had this kind of funny experience. One day, I
think probably in two thousand and nine or so, everyone
had blackberries at that time, iPhones were not as popular,
and I picked the BlackBerry up to speak into it,
and it was so hot that it almost burnd me
the mic in my phone, and I thought there was
something going wrong with it. But then everybody else started
having the same problem, that they were reporting the same problem,
and then emerged on a security website that what had
(12:41):
happened was they had tried to roll out to all
Blackberries a kind of patch that allowed them to selectively
download all of the messages of that person, because at
that time, BlackBerry messengers were considered very secure and you
couldn't get BlackBerry emails, and so basically the UA government
couldn't access what was happening on BlackBerry messengers. But instead
of rolling it out correctly, they rolled it out so
(13:02):
that all the phones instantly started trying to download all
the messages to a central server, and that server just
got completely overloaded instantly, But because it kept trying to
access it over and over again, it was heating up.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
The phones and was taken and directly involved in that.
We don't know, I guess, but do you have hypothesis
that he may have been.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I think it was part of the kinds of things
he was working on. I don't know if it was
his particular responsibility or decision, but I think yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Coming up, how do spymaster Shake became a pivotal player
in the global race for AI stay with us? How
did this sort of experience with building a technological surveillance
architecture prepare technom for the current chapter? I mean, how
(13:55):
do you go from the mid two thousands to today
in terms of the scale of what he's trying to
achieve even and how did this cyberspionare stuff in a
sense prepare him for the moment?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Well, I would say probably right now, the cyber espionage
stuff is actually holding him back to some extent because
he has it's a bit of a checkered history for
because the UAE has a lot of money and it
wants to invest that money in a way that results
in more money being made. And also they're quite trend following.
They love new technology, and when there's a big sector
(14:27):
interest in the world, they also are interested in that sector.
And then also any wealthy developing country so to speak,
can you use AI as a differentiator because they're going
to be less focused on like AI ethics or controls.
They'll be more focused on just using it, getting it going,
but there will be less handringing about the problems and
risks of that. So I think the UA is just
(14:49):
a place that is generating a lot of money because
of oil, and they're looking for places to put it,
and they're excited to put it into the things that
seem exciting.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
One of these things is Stargate, right star Yeah, And
Stargate is this huge investment program to build data centers
that Trump announced recently with Larry Ellison from Oracle and
Sam Altman from Open AI and Nassi actually so from SoftBank.
According to your piece, Taknoon is in control of an
enormous amount of money one point five trillion dollars, and
(15:18):
after he was kind of passed over in the succession race,
he was made chairman of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority,
a sovereign wealth fund that controls money on behalf of
the government. On top of that, Taknoon presides over something
called Group forty two or G forty two. Can you
tell us a bit more about this tech conglomerate.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
So one of Tartnun's favorite things are conglomerates, and there's
many different parts of money in Abudwi. There's more passive
big funds like the abadw Investment Authority, and then there's
all these more aggressive funds. There's Mubadala, and then there's
even more aggressive funds which are like the Tatnoon entities.
These different conglomerates. One of the ones he created was
(16:02):
called G forty two or Group forty two is supposedly
a reference to is that Hitchiker's Guy, Hitchiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. Yeah, so this group was a kind of
Frankenstein in a way. It collected some old companies that
were moved under it, and then it also established new initiatives,
and like all golf things, it was extremely well funded,
you know, in the billions. But also hidden within the
(16:25):
structure are companies that could be even perceived as a
bit problematic because of the kind of work they were doing.
So it kind of has again this James Bond villain
vibe Group forty two.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So there's this one chess game happening in the Middle
East between Kutter and Saudi and UAE, and then there's
another global chess game when it comes to technology, and
I think we just talked about Stargate, but then we
had the deep seek Chinese AI model. We've had the
hand ringing about whether or not export controls on video
(16:57):
chips actually effective. Is taking on positioning himself with the
UAE's cash and his investments, to play a role in
this larger global chess game.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
I think in general, the UAE doesn't have an inherent
AI advantage. They haven't, for example, drawn all the world's
best AI people to live in Abu Dawi to build
their companies. So what they can do is piggyback on
these bigger companies in Silicon Valley. And the challenge that
they've had in the chess game is that the US
is taking this very protectionist view of AI and they're
(17:32):
saying this is like a national treasure security issue, and
they told the UA, look, you can't work with China
if you're going to work with US. So one of
the things that group for you two has had to do,
and what Town News had to do is basically jettison
all of this maybe perhaps billions of dollars of investment
in China related joint ventures just to have access to
the seemingly cutting edge USAI companies.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
So in a sense, the US forced Tarknoon into a
choice between the US and China in terms of access
to investment.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yes, exactly, because if the UAE remained close with China,
especially some of these companies like Huawei and had this
potential risk according to the US of IP leakage and
information leakage to the Chinese companies and the government, then
the US was going to block them from having any
of the fancy Nvidia chips that you need to kind
(18:29):
of do this AI training and make it very difficult
for them to have play a role in AI at all.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And why now and what made what made this moment
that the one to kind of run a big story
on Tagnoon.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Well, primarily I would say is that he had become
such a high profile person. So not only had he
taken on so much money control of so much money
in the country, so he became this big investor globally,
but also he had really sort of broken through from
spymaster to kind of citing to be this more public figure.
(19:02):
So even last summer he was on this big almost
like a road show. It is very similar to when
Mohammed bin Salman first came to America and he had
all the meetings in Silicon Valley and in Texas. So
actually taught Nun did the exact same trip this last summer,
and it was all in anticipation of this kind of
rebranding of him and the rebranding of his efforts as
(19:22):
being you know, the friendly partner in AI investing. And
obviously this coincides with this huge demand for funding because
you know, these companies like open Ai are just absorbing
billions of dollars and just burning it on training new
models and trying to grow and defeat the competition.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Can you just explain what is the balance they're trying
to strike between investing in projects like Stargate and investing domestically.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Well, I think Stargate is for the UA. Stargate would
be a political investment to just make Trump happy because
it means that because Trump loves to make announcements where
there's big numbers, and they contributed to that. So anybody
who comes to Washington and agrees to make a big
number announcement gets you know, FaceTime with the President. So
(20:10):
there's a political element for sure. And then on top
of that, it's continuing to beat down the skepticism of
the UAE as a trustworthy partner. There's a lot of
people in the security apparatus who think it's a terrible
idea to allow anything sensitive within the UAE. Not not
even because the UA wants to leak it, but maybe
they just can't even prevent it from leaking in some cases,
(20:32):
like it may just be considered a leaky place for
one reason or another. And then also it's a chance
for them to grow closer to these companies like open
AI and potentially get open AI to let them build
facilities in the UA, which leads to other economic benefits
for the UAE. And also they always like to be
close to domain experts so that they can figure out
(20:54):
how they might be able to apply those innovations in
the country. So the UA has in a bit of
head of the curve. They had the first Minister of
AI before this big AI boom, and I think because
they're so small, they really want to use this to
tackle the bureaucracy of the country and make it possible
to even better self govern themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And of course one of the key things you need
a lot of AI right now seemingly is cash, but
the other is energy. So there is a there's a
kind of geo strategic advantage that UA has in that respect, right.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, And also the UA because of the distorted amount
of capital in Abu Dhabi and because everything is top down,
they end up doing a lot of things that are
not economically feasible in the short term, Like, for example,
when they're building infrastructure, they overbuild. They like vastly overbuild
their infrastructure, which at the time is inefficient as an
(21:49):
economic point. But in this particular case, now they have
all this excess capacity for power, for space, for water,
and things like that that they can use to now
pivot towards building data centers for example.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
How did China react to technoum walking away from some
of those relationships.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, that's one thing that I talked to some people
in the US government about which was interesting that usually
when somebody makes a public kind of embarrassment for China
or they reject them, or they tear their equipment out
or whatever, or they suggest that Huawei is unreliable or
a state backed conspiracy or something, they tend to punish
people for that in one way or another. But now
(22:30):
in the UA's case. I think China's playing a longer game.
They realize the UA has to make these kind of
comments and follow the US orders I guess or requirements.
But I think that the fact that they didn't say
anything about it suggests that they feel very comfortable in
their relationship with UAE in the long run, and that
the UAE itself is going to follow the rules to
(22:50):
the letter of the law, but not beyond that. So
there's going to be always room for further discussion.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
When we come back the future of the United Arab
Emirates global AI influence stay with US. Did the US
under the Biden administration build in any enforcement requirements to
make sure that in return for access to key US
(23:23):
technologies technolo in the UAE sort of kepture their word
and didn't also work with China. Or was this like
a handshake agreement.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
I don't think there's a lot of teeth on it,
But I think Microsoft has taken on a lot of
responsibility because they're sort of the partner at Group forty two.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So Microsoft invested in Group forty.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Two, yes, as a kind of as part of this
whole agreement with the US government to allow the UA
to start having more access to AI technology and these chips.
So Microsoft has kind of became a little bit of
a steward of that decision. So they've taken on a
little risk because if for some reason group who does
something untoward which we don't think or no they will,
(24:04):
then Microsoft will look pretty bad for having been an
investor in the company and overseer of this relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
It's so fascinating how there's so much criticism of state
owned enterprises in China from a US perspective, but this
seems to be, at least on the surface, looks like
an example of a private company sort of being coupted
by the government or encouraged by the government to play
a role in diplomacy.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah. I mean, it's a very complex space too, and
you know, also it's one of those things where there's
so much going on all the time. For example, it's
my understanding that in the future, whenever you use chat
GBT and maybe in certain parts of the world, there's
a chance that your query will rout through the UAE.
So there's two types of AI that require these chips.
(24:52):
One of them is the training of the original models,
and that's kind of like the secret sauce very closely
held that will continue to be only done in America.
But then the other thing is the actual workforce nature
of AI where it which is called inference. And so
if you're putting in a request that could route through
the UA, and it's a little nerve wracking if you,
(25:12):
for example, might be an IMMORDI activist based in London,
to know that you know you're trying to build your
some sort of a document using AI, it might be
routing through the UE. And there's just a feeling, at
least at this stage, that that's a bit risky. And
it's unclear if it is a risk or not, but
it definitely feels like a risk.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
So, taking a step back, what is your interpretation of
what Technowon's key goal is today overall with all of
his AI stuff, and is he on track to achieving it?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I would say his big goal is to I mean,
it's funny to say it like this, but simplistically, his
big goal is to look like he's succeeding. So the
optics of all these deals, for example, saying I made
a return on this deal are the thing that matters
the most. Nothing matters more than that, And then after that,
(26:02):
it might be that AI somehow helps transform the country
and makes it more efficient and makes it a better
place to live and things like that. But that's a
distant second to the first one, which again just is
a very clear indication that we're dealing with an absolute
monarchy without power centered in one place. So it's all
about how you look visa vis your brother or brothers,
(26:25):
and that's the most important thing to them of all.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I think, I guess two big things changed since you
reported this story. The first is the Biden administration became
the Trump administration, and the second was this kind of
like deep seek freak out where the power of export
controls on Nvidia GPUs was was questioned. Can you kind
of talk about both of those things in terms of
how they affect the fundamental dynamics of the story that
(26:50):
you wrote.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah. I think on the Trump side, he's always been
a fan of this transactional relationship with the Golf, like
he wants to do a big deal and they have
a lot of money, and let's do a deal. And
the UA. He's always understood that the Gulf people in general,
the leaders enjoy Donald Trump for that reason because they
kind of know who they're dealing with. He's not somebody
who's going to be trying to enforce some sort of
(27:14):
view of what the world should be like or what
human rights are things like that. Not that they don't
believe in human rights in the UAE, but they just
have a very different understanding of government. They believe in
absolute power and they don't believe in democracy and things
like that. So I think on the Trump side, things
are looking good for them. But on the other hand,
Trump is still pretty hawkish on China and so the
(27:38):
same kind of standards that were placed before. By the way,
the kind of criticism of the Group forty two deal
wasn't coming from the Democrats. Actually it was coming from
both sides, including a lot of people who are hawkish
on China and things like that. So I think he
will still be persuaded by the China argument to keep
very tight control on AI technology. So it's probably not
(27:59):
too transformed different that respect. On the deepseak side, I'm
sure at a strategic level, they were thinking to themselves
that they've really sided with the US in a somewhat
short sighted way, because if they had stuck with their
China partnerships, they maybe would have had access to just
as good, if not cheaper, less constrained requirements and rules
(28:22):
around China AI. But at the end of the day,
the UAE has always been a fairly pro US leaning country,
So I'm not sure if they would have gone completely
gone a different direction, but it would have given them
a different kind of leverage in these discussions.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
And then I guess, just to close, what will you
be looking out for in this story as it develops?
I mean, this is the Tech Stuff podcast. What should
the text Stuff audience know and be thinking about when
it comes to the interaction between the golf monarchys, their
investment portfolios, and the development of technology in the US.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Well, I'm very persuaded by this publication called Rest of
the World, which is run by a called Sophie Schmidt,
and they have this view which I really subscribe to,
which is that all of the best and worst things
that could happen with AI are not going to happen
necessarily in the Western countries first, because if you're in Indonesia,
(29:15):
if you're in Thailand, that's where people are going to
really be able to push the limits on the AI
use cases in ways that are both dangerous and good
at the same time. So I think watching how AI
is used in countries around the world, especially places like
the UAE, is very indicative of the true underlying value
and danger of AI, because it's like, you know, if
(29:37):
a criminal sits down with an AI and it's not
controlled in the way that it is controlled now, and
they say they want to do something, it could become
an ingenious tool to invent schemes and things like that.
And the same thing can be true of countries which
is inventing things, inventing ways of repression, of monitoring the
population and things like that. So I think that's really crucial,
really important. The story that I wrote was a lot
(29:59):
more about strategic geostrategic element, but the application of AI
is really important on the geo strategic level. I would
also be really interested to see how the Saudi UAE
relationship continues to play out. Saudi is a much bigger
country with a much bigger economy, much bigger ambitions in
a way, and now they're watching the UAE make these
(30:19):
announcements with Donald Trump, and they're they're most likely in
my view, sitting back thinking about Okay, what's our you know,
one two punch going to be that's going to completely
change this equation and make us the leading investor in
AI in the world.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Thank you, Bradley, No problem. That's it for tech Stuff,
I'm os Vloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis
and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me Karen
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for
iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley makes this episode and Kyle Murder
(30:59):
Rodolph join us on Friday for the Weekend tech We'll
break down the headlines and hear from our friends at
four or Form Media about how Hollywood is getting creative
with AI. Please rate, review and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We can't
wait to hear from you.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by Bradley Hope.
Hope is an investigative journalist and author. He's the co
(00:21):
founder of Project Brazen, a narrative nonfiction production studio based
in London and Singapore, and before starting his own journalism company,
Hope covered the Arab spring from Cairo, Beirut, and Abu
Dhabi and led investigations as a financial reporter at The
Wall Street Journal. He also co wrote the book Billion
Dollar Whale, about the Malaysian businessman Jolo. We asked Bradley
(00:44):
to join us from his studio in London to discuss
his recent piece in Wired Irresistibly, titled a Spymaster Shake
controls a one point five trillion dollar fortune. He wants
to use it to dominate Ai. So who is the
spy master?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Shaikh So? The spine master is Abu Dhabi. Royal Shaik
Taknun Benzayed al Nahyan.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Shak Tarnun is one of the twenty odd sons of
the United Arab Emirates first president. But back when Hope
started paying attention to this shadowy figure, he didn't play
a major role in government.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
He was kind of this minor real estate tycoon with
Harbyish businesses.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
When Hope moved to Abu Dhabi soon after the two
thousand and eight financial crisis, one of the things he
covered for a newspaper was real estate. The country was
in the midst of a building boom, and the craze
spread to the island surrounding Abu Dhabi, including a place
called Riem Island. Hope soon discovered that Reem Island was
actually Shake Taknun's personal project.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
He wanted it to be kind of a little mini
manhattan next to Abadabi. It was like a building site,
you know. It was just tons of different projects rising up,
and even today it looks sort of half built. And
so I was always very interested in him because he
had this kind of diletantish thing about him that was
kind of irresistible. And over the years I watched as
(02:05):
he just rose higher and higher in the power structure
of Abu Dhabi.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Today, Sheikh Tagnun is the United Arab Emirates National Security Advisor,
the intelligence chief to one of the world's wealthiest and
most surveillance oriented small nations. Taknun is also the younger
brother of the Yue's President, Mohammad bin Zayed al Nayan.
Outside his duties as the national security Advisor, Taknun has
(02:30):
official control over much of Abu Dhabi's vast sovereign wealth.
According to Bloomberg News, he directly oversees a one point
five trillion dollar empire. To put that in perspective, that's
more cash than just about anybody on the planet. And
as you might expect of a spymaster, Sheikh Taknun is
a mysterious figure, but over the years, Bradley Hope has
(02:54):
been able to make enough connections in the UAE to
learn more about this extremely influential politician and diplomat, a
man who seems to be transforming the small but wealthy
country into a major AI power. You described him as
one third Gulf royal, one third fitness obsessed tech founder,
and one third bond villain. Can you talk a little
(03:16):
bit about those three legs of the stool of Tachmoon.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Well, I mean, so the bond villain part, you could
call it slightly unfair of me, but I find him
to be kind of giving off that vibe. He always
wears sunglasses indoors or outdoors, and it's because of a
light sensitivity, according to people I spoke to, but it
still gives him a James Bond villain a kind of feeling.
He commands this obscured network of companies that are all
(03:44):
involved in different types of espionage, and he has his
fingers in so many places. Like on one hand, he's
got all these AI companies. He's really mixed up in China.
He is a big investor in Israel. Under the normalization
of UAE Israel, he's kind of still the spymaster stuff.
He's always been obsessed with mixed martial arts and jiu
(04:05):
jitsu and has really become like this major patron of
the sport in the whole world. He flies over the
best sportsman in that sport and they come and train
with him and spend time with them. And I spoke
to a few of those guys and they said, you know,
he's just a kind of a fitness freak. He eats
one meal a day, he's exercising for two hours per day.
(04:25):
You know, he really believes in longevity, and you know,
I'm guessing that he probably takes like a hundred supplements
a day, you know, that kind of stuff. He's a
very interesting character. And then once you start studying the
Gulf royals, you really get to see what happens when
interesting characters are given access to resources, they just become
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
There's a great quote in your piece which is nearly
every story about royalty in the Gulf is a story
about succession, about paternalistic families trying to ward off external
threats and internal rivalries that crop up when inherited power
is up grabs. How is that relevant to understanding tachmoon Well,
I think that this has been something I spent a
(05:07):
lot of my journalistic career on, which is being fascinated
by these modern monarchies.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's no real monarchy in the world except for the Gulf.
You know. These are true old fashioned monarchies where all
power is derived from these families, and they can make
huge decisions, and they can direct the entire country's wealth
towards achieving those goals. There's no technical mandate, like they
can't be voted out. But on the other hand, there's
(05:35):
a lot of brittleness that is created by generational transfer
of power, so by the time it gets to the
third generation, it's almost always getting very fraught. Behind every decision,
there's also a bit of maneuvering and trying to establish
what's my power going to be and if my brother
were to pass away, where do I stand, and all
that sort of.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Thing, and it's my understanding. This is almost exactly what
happened to Takmoon in twenty twenty two. His brother Mohammed
Benzaied became the president of the UAE, and shortly after that,
Muhammad named his own son as successor, and so am
I writing thinking there was kind of a need to
appease Taknun, who may have seen this decision as a snub.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Well, I'd say Tartannun became very ambitious over time, and
in the case that this younger son of Mahma Benzaid
became the crown prince, there needed to be some sort
of a trade with Toatnun to make him happy about
that arrangement, And essentially the deal was that he would
get much greater control over the investments of the country.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
There's a detail in the story that I love about
how Taknun's sort of interest in technology began as a
personal fixation on the collaboration between man and machine. Can
you speak a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So back in the early two thousands when Shake Tatnun
started building this conglomerate called the Royal Group. Essentially, it's
a series of holding groups, which hold holding groups, which
hold companies, which hold further companies. One of the things
he got obsessed with was chess as a game that
he liked to play personally, and he became very interested
in how to invest in chess computers. This was the
(07:14):
era of Garry Kasparov playing against the Deep Blue, and
so he found an interesting I believe, Austrian computer scientists,
and it basically bankrolled that guy to develop a chess
computer called Hydra. And the Hydra was especially well known
during that period for this kind of man plus machine
(07:35):
style of playing chess. And so you would be able
to you as a human were there using it kind
of like how we use AI today. You use it
as a tool to play against a player.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
As it suggests a range of moves and you pick
the most optimal one or.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, to some extent, I think to a large extent,
it tells you the next move and you just kind
of executed it. Yeah, So he was playing chess online
so much that the computer scientist was like wondering when
he was going to get offline because he needed to,
you know, tinker with the code and stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Incredible. I mean, if you'll often talk about the Middle
East as a chess board, it's one of the kind
of hoary analogyes, for thinking about the Middle East. But
I mean, do you see something in Technom's fascination with
chess and desire to win in chess that is a
kind of key to understanding how he's approached his own
rights to power.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I mean, to some extent, A country like the
UAE is in a very interesting sort of precarious position
compared to some other bigger country. It's pretty small. It's
a country of I think it's something like six million residents.
Of those, more than a million are actual emiratis, so
it's a very small population. The country is famously full
(08:45):
of expats, so there's no way that they could ever
go to war with another country. As a country, they
really have to be kind of strategically allied at the
same time as that they don't want to just be
a pawn of the West or of America. So they're
in things like developing a stronger relationship with China. So
I do think someone like Toatnoon and someone like the
(09:05):
President Muhammad Bin de Sided figuring out how how they
fit into the world is is a very strategic question
for them.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I want to kind of chart Technolog's progress from eccentric
with interest in chess and robotics to spy master to
this kind of current AI investor at large. But maybe
we can start with with his kind of becoming a
spy master. How did that start to happen? How did
it start to show up?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, I'll caveat by saying it's very hard to know
everything about these people because they don't give interviews, nobody
talks around them in an official capacity. You know, it's
a very difficult place to report on, and I'm only
able to do so because I've lived in the region
and i just developed enough relationships where I'm able to
(09:53):
do that. But my hypothesis around how he became a
spymaster is actually focused on this digit because when he
was running Royal Group and focusing on Rheam Island and
not really playing a huge role in sort of the
strategic part of the country. They started having some questions
about how do they use technology to enforce essentially a
(10:16):
police state because the UAE, like I said before, is
kind of fragile. It's kind of a spy's paradise because
all the countries in the world are there, and so
they're all spying against each other, and there's an element
of danger and risk to their whole positioning. If there
was a bomb that exploded in Dubai or something, that
would be hugely problematic for the country. So they were
(10:36):
thinking about, well, we can't have like police on every corner.
We're not China, we don't have that size of a population,
so we need to use other techniques, and technology was
the answer, you know. And so I think top Nune
just had a much greater appreciation of technology and that
was enough to make him start to play a crucial
role in how do we use technology for domestic security
(10:58):
and then overtime for external threats as well. And so
there was like a pro democracy activist in the UAE,
and famously, when they figured out how his computer had
been hacked, they traced it back to the Royal Group
there was like a connection in the kind of digital trail,
So that's why I have that hypothesis. And then also
(11:18):
there's an element of his personality which is useful too,
which is he doesn't seem to me in all my
reporting to be a judgmental person or a dogmatic person
at all, which is probably useful to be as a spymaster.
So whenever, for example, secret meetings happened, he would be
often the person that would go, and it wouldn't be
like a news item for him to go, versus if
(11:41):
his brother went. The kind of effective ruler, and he
seemed to have a kind of cool temper because the
UAE was in this very pitched, never physical, but very
heated battle with Qatar, this other little island nearby, and
eventually when they reached a deal mostly broke good by
Saudi Arabia, it was only tak Noon who would go
(12:03):
and meet the quitaris. So I think that's kind of
why he eased into the role to some extent.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
What was some of the other kind of signature cyber
espionage programs and did you have any experience of them
in the period you were living in UAE.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I had this kind of funny experience. One day, I
think probably in two thousand and nine or so, everyone
had blackberries at that time, iPhones were not as popular,
and I picked the BlackBerry up to speak into it,
and it was so hot that it almost burnd me
the mic in my phone, and I thought there was
something going wrong with it. But then everybody else started
having the same problem, that they were reporting the same problem,
and then emerged on a security website that what had
(12:41):
happened was they had tried to roll out to all
Blackberries a kind of patch that allowed them to selectively
download all of the messages of that person, because at
that time, BlackBerry messengers were considered very secure and you
couldn't get BlackBerry emails, and so basically the UA government
couldn't access what was happening on BlackBerry messengers. But instead
of rolling it out correctly, they rolled it out so
(13:02):
that all the phones instantly started trying to download all
the messages to a central server, and that server just
got completely overloaded instantly, But because it kept trying to
access it over and over again, it was heating up.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
The phones and was taken and directly involved in that.
We don't know, I guess, but do you have hypothesis
that he may have been.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I think it was part of the kinds of things
he was working on. I don't know if it was
his particular responsibility or decision, but I think yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Coming up, how do spymaster Shake became a pivotal player
in the global race for AI stay with us? How
did this sort of experience with building a technological surveillance
architecture prepare technom for the current chapter? I mean, how
(13:55):
do you go from the mid two thousands to today
in terms of the scale of what he's trying to
achieve even and how did this cyberspionare stuff in a
sense prepare him for the moment?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Well, I would say probably right now, the cyber espionage
stuff is actually holding him back to some extent because
he has it's a bit of a checkered history for
because the UAE has a lot of money and it
wants to invest that money in a way that results
in more money being made. And also they're quite trend following.
They love new technology, and when there's a big sector
(14:27):
interest in the world, they also are interested in that sector.
And then also any wealthy developing country so to speak,
can you use AI as a differentiator because they're going
to be less focused on like AI ethics or controls.
They'll be more focused on just using it, getting it going,
but there will be less handringing about the problems and
risks of that. So I think the UA is just
(14:49):
a place that is generating a lot of money because
of oil, and they're looking for places to put it,
and they're excited to put it into the things that
seem exciting.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
One of these things is Stargate, right star Yeah, And
Stargate is this huge investment program to build data centers
that Trump announced recently with Larry Ellison from Oracle and
Sam Altman from Open AI and Nassi actually so from SoftBank.
According to your piece, Taknoon is in control of an
enormous amount of money one point five trillion dollars, and
(15:18):
after he was kind of passed over in the succession race,
he was made chairman of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority,
a sovereign wealth fund that controls money on behalf of
the government. On top of that, Taknoon presides over something
called Group forty two or G forty two. Can you
tell us a bit more about this tech conglomerate.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
So one of Tartnun's favorite things are conglomerates, and there's
many different parts of money in Abudwi. There's more passive
big funds like the abadw Investment Authority, and then there's
all these more aggressive funds. There's Mubadala, and then there's
even more aggressive funds which are like the Tatnoon entities.
These different conglomerates. One of the ones he created was
(16:02):
called G forty two or Group forty two is supposedly
a reference to is that Hitchiker's Guy, Hitchiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. Yeah, so this group was a kind of
Frankenstein in a way. It collected some old companies that
were moved under it, and then it also established new initiatives,
and like all golf things, it was extremely well funded,
you know, in the billions. But also hidden within the
(16:25):
structure are companies that could be even perceived as a
bit problematic because of the kind of work they were doing.
So it kind of has again this James Bond villain
vibe Group forty two.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So there's this one chess game happening in the Middle
East between Kutter and Saudi and UAE, and then there's
another global chess game when it comes to technology, and
I think we just talked about Stargate, but then we
had the deep seek Chinese AI model. We've had the
hand ringing about whether or not export controls on video
(16:57):
chips actually effective. Is taking on positioning himself with the
UAE's cash and his investments, to play a role in
this larger global chess game.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
I think in general, the UAE doesn't have an inherent
AI advantage. They haven't, for example, drawn all the world's
best AI people to live in Abu Dawi to build
their companies. So what they can do is piggyback on
these bigger companies in Silicon Valley. And the challenge that
they've had in the chess game is that the US
is taking this very protectionist view of AI and they're
(17:32):
saying this is like a national treasure security issue, and
they told the UA, look, you can't work with China
if you're going to work with US. So one of
the things that group for you two has had to do,
and what Town News had to do is basically jettison
all of this maybe perhaps billions of dollars of investment
in China related joint ventures just to have access to
the seemingly cutting edge USAI companies.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
So in a sense, the US forced Tarknoon into a
choice between the US and China in terms of access
to investment.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yes, exactly, because if the UAE remained close with China,
especially some of these companies like Huawei and had this
potential risk according to the US of IP leakage and
information leakage to the Chinese companies and the government, then
the US was going to block them from having any
of the fancy Nvidia chips that you need to kind
(18:29):
of do this AI training and make it very difficult
for them to have play a role in AI at all.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And why now and what made what made this moment
that the one to kind of run a big story
on Tagnoon.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Well, primarily I would say is that he had become
such a high profile person. So not only had he
taken on so much money control of so much money
in the country, so he became this big investor globally,
but also he had really sort of broken through from
spymaster to kind of citing to be this more public figure.
(19:02):
So even last summer he was on this big almost
like a road show. It is very similar to when
Mohammed bin Salman first came to America and he had
all the meetings in Silicon Valley and in Texas. So
actually taught Nun did the exact same trip this last summer,
and it was all in anticipation of this kind of
rebranding of him and the rebranding of his efforts as
(19:22):
being you know, the friendly partner in AI investing. And
obviously this coincides with this huge demand for funding because
you know, these companies like open Ai are just absorbing
billions of dollars and just burning it on training new
models and trying to grow and defeat the competition.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Can you just explain what is the balance they're trying
to strike between investing in projects like Stargate and investing domestically.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Well, I think Stargate is for the UA. Stargate would
be a political investment to just make Trump happy because
it means that because Trump loves to make announcements where
there's big numbers, and they contributed to that. So anybody
who comes to Washington and agrees to make a big
number announcement gets you know, FaceTime with the President. So
(20:10):
there's a political element for sure. And then on top
of that, it's continuing to beat down the skepticism of
the UAE as a trustworthy partner. There's a lot of
people in the security apparatus who think it's a terrible
idea to allow anything sensitive within the UAE. Not not
even because the UA wants to leak it, but maybe
they just can't even prevent it from leaking in some cases,
(20:32):
like it may just be considered a leaky place for
one reason or another. And then also it's a chance
for them to grow closer to these companies like open
AI and potentially get open AI to let them build
facilities in the UA, which leads to other economic benefits
for the UAE. And also they always like to be
close to domain experts so that they can figure out
(20:54):
how they might be able to apply those innovations in
the country. So the UA has in a bit of
head of the curve. They had the first Minister of
AI before this big AI boom, and I think because
they're so small, they really want to use this to
tackle the bureaucracy of the country and make it possible
to even better self govern themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And of course one of the key things you need
a lot of AI right now seemingly is cash, but
the other is energy. So there is a there's a
kind of geo strategic advantage that UA has in that respect, right.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, And also the UA because of the distorted amount
of capital in Abu Dhabi and because everything is top down,
they end up doing a lot of things that are
not economically feasible in the short term, Like, for example,
when they're building infrastructure, they overbuild. They like vastly overbuild
their infrastructure, which at the time is inefficient as an
(21:49):
economic point. But in this particular case, now they have
all this excess capacity for power, for space, for water,
and things like that that they can use to now
pivot towards building data centers for example.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
How did China react to technoum walking away from some
of those relationships.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, that's one thing that I talked to some people
in the US government about which was interesting that usually
when somebody makes a public kind of embarrassment for China
or they reject them, or they tear their equipment out
or whatever, or they suggest that Huawei is unreliable or
a state backed conspiracy or something, they tend to punish
people for that in one way or another. But now
(22:30):
in the UA's case. I think China's playing a longer game.
They realize the UA has to make these kind of
comments and follow the US orders I guess or requirements.
But I think that the fact that they didn't say
anything about it suggests that they feel very comfortable in
their relationship with UAE in the long run, and that
the UAE itself is going to follow the rules to
(22:50):
the letter of the law, but not beyond that. So
there's going to be always room for further discussion.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
When we come back the future of the United Arab
Emirates global AI influence stay with US. Did the US
under the Biden administration build in any enforcement requirements to
make sure that in return for access to key US
(23:23):
technologies technolo in the UAE sort of kepture their word
and didn't also work with China. Or was this like
a handshake agreement.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
I don't think there's a lot of teeth on it,
But I think Microsoft has taken on a lot of
responsibility because they're sort of the partner at Group forty two.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So Microsoft invested in Group forty.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Two, yes, as a kind of as part of this
whole agreement with the US government to allow the UA
to start having more access to AI technology and these chips.
So Microsoft has kind of became a little bit of
a steward of that decision. So they've taken on a
little risk because if for some reason group who does
something untoward which we don't think or no they will,
(24:04):
then Microsoft will look pretty bad for having been an
investor in the company and overseer of this relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
It's so fascinating how there's so much criticism of state
owned enterprises in China from a US perspective, but this
seems to be, at least on the surface, looks like
an example of a private company sort of being coupted
by the government or encouraged by the government to play
a role in diplomacy.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah. I mean, it's a very complex space too, and
you know, also it's one of those things where there's
so much going on all the time. For example, it's
my understanding that in the future, whenever you use chat
GBT and maybe in certain parts of the world, there's
a chance that your query will rout through the UAE.
So there's two types of AI that require these chips.
(24:52):
One of them is the training of the original models,
and that's kind of like the secret sauce very closely
held that will continue to be only done in America.
But then the other thing is the actual workforce nature
of AI where it which is called inference. And so
if you're putting in a request that could route through
the UA, and it's a little nerve wracking if you,
(25:12):
for example, might be an IMMORDI activist based in London,
to know that you know you're trying to build your
some sort of a document using AI, it might be
routing through the UE. And there's just a feeling, at
least at this stage, that that's a bit risky. And
it's unclear if it is a risk or not, but
it definitely feels like a risk.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
So, taking a step back, what is your interpretation of
what Technowon's key goal is today overall with all of
his AI stuff, and is he on track to achieving it?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I would say his big goal is to I mean,
it's funny to say it like this, but simplistically, his
big goal is to look like he's succeeding. So the
optics of all these deals, for example, saying I made
a return on this deal are the thing that matters
the most. Nothing matters more than that, And then after that,
(26:02):
it might be that AI somehow helps transform the country
and makes it more efficient and makes it a better
place to live and things like that. But that's a
distant second to the first one, which again just is
a very clear indication that we're dealing with an absolute
monarchy without power centered in one place. So it's all
about how you look visa vis your brother or brothers,
(26:25):
and that's the most important thing to them of all.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I think, I guess two big things changed since you
reported this story. The first is the Biden administration became
the Trump administration, and the second was this kind of
like deep seek freak out where the power of export
controls on Nvidia GPUs was was questioned. Can you kind
of talk about both of those things in terms of
how they affect the fundamental dynamics of the story that
(26:50):
you wrote.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah. I think on the Trump side, he's always been
a fan of this transactional relationship with the Golf, like
he wants to do a big deal and they have
a lot of money, and let's do a deal. And
the UA. He's always understood that the Gulf people in general,
the leaders enjoy Donald Trump for that reason because they
kind of know who they're dealing with. He's not somebody
who's going to be trying to enforce some sort of
(27:14):
view of what the world should be like or what
human rights are things like that. Not that they don't
believe in human rights in the UAE, but they just
have a very different understanding of government. They believe in
absolute power and they don't believe in democracy and things
like that. So I think on the Trump side, things
are looking good for them. But on the other hand,
Trump is still pretty hawkish on China and so the
(27:38):
same kind of standards that were placed before. By the way,
the kind of criticism of the Group forty two deal
wasn't coming from the Democrats. Actually it was coming from
both sides, including a lot of people who are hawkish
on China and things like that. So I think he
will still be persuaded by the China argument to keep
very tight control on AI technology. So it's probably not
(27:59):
too transformed different that respect. On the deepseak side, I'm
sure at a strategic level, they were thinking to themselves
that they've really sided with the US in a somewhat
short sighted way, because if they had stuck with their
China partnerships, they maybe would have had access to just
as good, if not cheaper, less constrained requirements and rules
(28:22):
around China AI. But at the end of the day,
the UAE has always been a fairly pro US leaning country,
So I'm not sure if they would have gone completely
gone a different direction, but it would have given them
a different kind of leverage in these discussions.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
And then I guess, just to close, what will you
be looking out for in this story as it develops?
I mean, this is the Tech Stuff podcast. What should
the text Stuff audience know and be thinking about when
it comes to the interaction between the golf monarchys, their
investment portfolios, and the development of technology in the US.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Well, I'm very persuaded by this publication called Rest of
the World, which is run by a called Sophie Schmidt,
and they have this view which I really subscribe to,
which is that all of the best and worst things
that could happen with AI are not going to happen
necessarily in the Western countries first, because if you're in Indonesia,
(29:15):
if you're in Thailand, that's where people are going to
really be able to push the limits on the AI
use cases in ways that are both dangerous and good
at the same time. So I think watching how AI
is used in countries around the world, especially places like
the UAE, is very indicative of the true underlying value
and danger of AI, because it's like, you know, if
(29:37):
a criminal sits down with an AI and it's not
controlled in the way that it is controlled now, and
they say they want to do something, it could become
an ingenious tool to invent schemes and things like that.
And the same thing can be true of countries which
is inventing things, inventing ways of repression, of monitoring the
population and things like that. So I think that's really crucial,
really important. The story that I wrote was a lot
(29:59):
more about strategic geostrategic element, but the application of AI
is really important on the geo strategic level. I would
also be really interested to see how the Saudi UAE
relationship continues to play out. Saudi is a much bigger
country with a much bigger economy, much bigger ambitions in
a way, and now they're watching the UAE make these
(30:19):
announcements with Donald Trump, and they're they're most likely in
my view, sitting back thinking about Okay, what's our you know,
one two punch going to be that's going to completely
change this equation and make us the leading investor in
AI in the world.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Thank you, Bradley, No problem. That's it for tech Stuff,
I'm os Vloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis
and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me Karen
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for
iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley makes this episode and Kyle Murder
(30:59):
Rodolph join us on Friday for the Weekend tech We'll
break down the headlines and hear from our friends at
four or Form Media about how Hollywood is getting creative
with AI. Please rate, review and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We can't
wait to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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