Quick Recap of Generative IDC Directions’24

All countries in our region are trying to increase their competitiveness and superiority in Artificial Intelligence. IDC has identified 6 headings on this subject.

💡1) Public Adaptation: Countries in our region are pioneering in public artificial intelligence. Ministries of artificial intelligence, like the one in the United Arab Emirates, have been established in the country’s strategy (2017). Similarly, there are studies on this subject in our country, but artificial intelligence adaptation cannot reach the desired level due to limitations in cloud computing.

💡2) Infrastructure (GPU) Investments: There is serious competition here, with most GPU infrastructure in the United States. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have made significant investments in our region, but then the SEC blocked Nvidia. While there is no obstacle in Turkey at the moment, both the public and private sectors and local cloud providers need to invest in this area. We discussed this in the Cloud3.0 post. The provider closest to this in Turkey seems to be Bulutistan. In addition, in a hybrid model, existing GPU capacities should be increased by working closely with global cloud providers.

💡3) Turkish LLM Development: Surprisingly, we’re not bad at this, Havelsan in the public sector, Trendyol, Baykar, among our startups, Orbina AI and more are working on Turkish LLMs that will run on local servers. Here, models need to be made smaller and industry-specific.

💡4) Local Artificial Intelligence Companies / Startups: Their numbers need to increase rapidly, for which GPU support and academic support are necessary. They need to produce their models, not just use existing technologies.

💡5) Regulation: We will conduct detailed studies on this as the Cloud Security Alliance – Turkey Chapter, but basically, we need to develop a version of the AI ACT in the European Union, just like GDPR – KVKK.

💡6) Artificial Intelligence Skills: This is divided into technical and soft skills. We’re not bad at the technical part, but we have serious training and interest in these areas. The IDC presentation said that we are 10th in the world in terms of AI Talent🚀 Continuing what we are doing will be enough. In terms of Soft Skills, like the work done by Inci Abay Cansabuncu, studies/trainings need to be done on providing artificial intelligence support to our current workforce.

💡Bonus) Academy: This is the item added. Artificial intelligence companies or startups cannot be successful without academic support. This is not only in terms of education but especially in terms of research, increasing the number of graduate students, and doing joint projects with companies. The institution I see as a leader here is ITU. ITU needs to coordinate academically and set an example for other universities with its technology park, incubation center, institute, and education model.

Quick Recap of Generative AI Summit 2024