A former White House adviser on artificial intelligence has lauded Middle East governments' commitment to developing AI and said the US should bolster partnerships to assist with their ambitions, while also maintaining a global lead in the technology sector.
"The conviction of Middle East governments is certainly remarkable in AI and the ambition is also remarkable," said Ben Buchanan, who served under former president Joe Biden.
Mr Buchanan made the comments on Monday at Johns Hopkins University’s 2025 Emerging Technologies symposium in Washington, where he was asked about the UAE and Saudi Arabia's approach to AI.
The Arab world's biggest economies have invested heavily in AI. The UAE, in 2019, broke ground on the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, the world’s first higher-learning institution dedicated to AI.
Mr Buchanan warned that investment alone would not necessarily yield success and that co-operation and strategic alliances with other countries, such as the US, could make the difference.
"One of the foreign policy questions under the Biden administration and now under the Trump administration is going to be 'how do we structure the partnership in a way that keeps the Middle East with the United States?'" he said.
The UAE has developed strong partnerships with US companies such as Microsoft, and in turn the technology giant has pointed out that the country is "a hugely important hub" for its AI ambitions.
In March, the partnerships were on display during the visit of UAE officials to Washington, where AI, data centre infrastructures, energy and chip exports were the focus of talks with senior officials in the Trump administration.
US AI rivalry emerges with DeepSeek and China
Mr Buchanan also spoke at length about DeepSeek, the China-based AI company that has rattled the technology world, along with the US stock market, in recent months.
DeepSeek's large language model achieves parity with OpenAI models but claims to do so with far less computing power.
Some have suggested that, if DeepSeek's claims are true, the AI semiconductors and graphics processing units that have fuelled incredible wealth and innovation in the US are not especially important and could soon be rendered moot.
The company's debut in January caught many by surprise but not former White House officials like Mr Buchanan, who said he and others had started to pay attention to DeepSeek in 2023.
"The stuff they were putting out was pretty interesting, and we read some of their papers and we knew they were very talented, but we also knew they were compute constraint," he explained, noting that US AI chip export policies paved the way for DeepSeek to try to find efficiencies and algorithmic improvements.
He said although conventional wisdom was that DeepSeek's breakthrough's would spell trouble for the US, it is proof that Washington's strategy of exploiting its computing power is working.
"They’re still incredibly compute constrained, this remains a US advantage, and we should continue to double down on that advantage," he said, also expressing scepticism over DeepSeek's claims it spent less than $6 million to build its AI models – far less than the industry standard.
“They’re not accounting for all the money they spent on research up until the release of the model,” he said.
He also said US AI company Anthropic spent a similar amount of money to train its models, nullifying DeepSeek’s breakthrough to an extent.
Although some of the DeepSeek media buzz has died down, the company's AI assistant app is still going strong, routinely ranking in the top 10 productivity app downloads in Apple’s App Store.
The company keeps publishing new research and its LLM offerings are quickly finding their ways into daily life in China.
R1, DeepSeek’s open-source language model, is now available from Microsoft on the company’s Azure AI and Foundry development hub, while chip behemoth Nvidia has said R1 runs very well on its systems.
Despite all the intrigue behind DeepSeek, US-based OpenAI, Google and Meta still have more market share in the AI sector, along with plenty of funding to keep making improvements.
Mr Buchanan said success is no accident and it goes back to the US ability to attract talent from around the world.
"A lot of the people who are making great discoveries were not born in the United States, it’s our super power that we brought great people from all over the world to come and make contributions," he explained. “I hope we don’t lose that super power.”
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ESSENTIALS
The flights
Emirates flies from Dubai to Phnom Penh via Yangon from Dh2,700 return including taxes. Cambodia Bayon Airlines and Cambodia Angkor Air offer return flights from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap from Dh250 return including taxes. The flight takes about 45 minutes.
The hotels
Rooms at the Raffles Le Royal in Phnom Penh cost from $225 (Dh826) per night including taxes. Rooms at the Grand Hotel d'Angkor cost from $261 (Dh960) per night including taxes.
The tours
A cyclo architecture tour of Phnom Penh costs from $20 (Dh75) per person for about three hours, with Khmer Architecture Tours. Tailor-made tours of all of Cambodia, or sites like Angkor alone, can be arranged by About Asia Travel. Emirates Holidays also offers packages.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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LA LIGA FIXTURES
Thursday (All UAE kick-off times)
Sevilla v Real Betis (midnight)
Friday
Granada v Real Betis (9.30pm)
Valencia v Levante (midnight)
Saturday
Espanyol v Alaves (4pm)
Celta Vigo v Villarreal (7pm)
Leganes v Real Valladolid (9.30pm)
Mallorca v Barcelona (midnight)
Sunday
Atletic Bilbao v Atletico Madrid (4pm)
Real Madrid v Eibar (9.30pm)
Real Sociedad v Osasuna (midnight)
Analysis
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Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
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- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
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Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
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- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
Business Insights
- Canada and Mexico are significant energy suppliers to the US, providing the majority of oil and natural gas imports
- The introduction of tariffs could hinder the US's clean energy initiatives by raising input costs for materials like nickel
- US domestic suppliers might benefit from higher prices, but overall oil consumption is expected to decrease due to elevated costs
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The Bio
Favourite vegetable: “I really like the taste of the beetroot, the potatoes and the eggplant we are producing.”
Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
INDIA SQUADS
India squad for third Test against Sri Lanka
Virat Kohli (capt), Murali Vijay, Lokesh Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Rohit Sharma, Wriddhiman Saha, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, Ishant Sharma, Vijay Shankar
India squad for ODI series against Sri Lanka
Rohit Sharma (capt), Shikhar Dhawan, Ajinkya Rahane, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Dinesh Karthik, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Hardik Pandya, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Siddarth Kaul
How much sugar is in chocolate Easter eggs?
- The 169g Crunchie egg has 15.9g of sugar per 25g serving, working out at around 107g of sugar per egg
- The 190g Maltesers Teasers egg contains 58g of sugar per 100g for the egg and 19.6g of sugar in each of the two Teasers bars that come with it
- The 188g Smarties egg has 113g of sugar per egg and 22.8g in the tube of Smarties it contains
- The Milky Bar white chocolate Egg Hunt Pack contains eight eggs at 7.7g of sugar per egg
- The Cadbury Creme Egg contains 26g of sugar per 40g egg
