Pakistan Joins China in World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO)

On July 16 in Shanghai, 29 countries, including China, Pakistan and Russia, signed the founding agreement of WAICO, World AI Cooperation Organization.  Every BRICS founding member is in, except India. This agreement follows the launch of the US-led Pax Silica, a 24-member coalition, including India, which is designed to counter China's AI efforts. The stated goal of both these competing groups is to provide global governance, including building guardrails and setting standards, for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. 

US-China AI Competition


The announcement of WAICO coincided with the launch of Kimi K3 by Chinese startup Moonshot AI.  Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight AI model ever built, its full weights free for the world to download from July 27.  Cheaper open-source AI models like Kimi K3 pose a serious threat to U.S. proprietary models. By offering 80-90% of the capability at a fraction of the cost or for free, they are squeezing the premium pricing strategies of domestic leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Open-source AI models are a game-changer for developing nations like Pakistan, providing affordable, customizable technology without relying on expensive proprietary licenses or restrictive API models. Such models, like the ones offered by Chinese companies, empower governments and local developers to build "sovereign AI" tailored to regional languages, cultural contexts, and infrastructure limits, bypassing the need for massive data centers and reliance on foreign powers. 
Top Global AI Talent. Marco Polo AI Talent Tracker

Companies, including US-based firms, are rapidly adopting AI cost-saving measures. For example, Airbnb relies on Alibaba’s Qwen model, startups like Lindy have transitioned from Anthropic to DeepSeek, and DoorDash has employed Moonshot AI for specific workflows. Overall, Chinese open-source options now account for over 40% of Hugging Face AI community and 80% of open-source developer usage globally.

Open-source AI models—which are roughly 8 to 10 times cheaper to run than proprietary ones—are rapidly closing the reasoning and contextual intelligence gap with frontier models like Anthropic's Claude.  However, open source models shift the responsibility of infrastructure maintenance and security to the user.

The people of Chinese PRC origin account for 47% of the top 20% AI talent in the world based on undergraduate degree, according to a survey.  Americans make up 18%, Europeans 12% and Indians 5% of the global AI researchers. In terms of the countries they serve, 57% of them work in the United States, 12% in China, 8% in the UK, 4% each in France and Germany and 3% in Canada as of 2022. While the US still has the lion's share of the top talent, its share has declined from 65% in 2019 to 57% in 2022. Marco Polo talent tracker lists Pakistan among a dozen countries for top AI talent in Asia. 

More than half (15 out 25) of the institutions (companies and universities) where the top AI researchers work are located in the United States, while 6 are in China. The remaining four are in the UK, Switzerland, Singapore and Canada, according to Marco Polo Global AI Talent Tracker. 

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Views: 215

Comment by Riaz Haq 9 hours ago

@Hesamation

AT&T is doing exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic fear about enterprise.

they’re routing 40% of employee AI usage to open models, and intend to boost it to 60-70%.

> coding costs down 56%
> quality dropped just 2%
> 45B tokens/day btw.

AT&T AI chief: open models are “just as good or better” for many tasks.

they still use frontier models for the critical work but everything else gets routed to cheaper open models.

https://x.com/hesamation/status/2090518831349268851?s=46&t=Uy6j...

————————


Corporate America’s AI playbook is changing as more businesses substitute proprietary AI models in favor of open alternatives to save on costs. AT&T’s effort to remake its business for the AI era shows just how far that shift has come.

https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/why-at-t-is-betting-big-on-open-wei...



Such open models currently power about 25% of the telecommunications company’s overall AI usage, including helping manage its network, said AT&T Chief Data and AI Officer Andy Markus, “and we believe we can get way higher than that.”


That conviction has driven Markus to experiment with a number of different open models, including powerful new models from China, which help prevent AT&T from becoming “beholden to any one solution,” he said.

The company’s focus on using open models comes at a time when U.S. companies are starting to put tighter controls around their AI spending. Companies say one way to lower AI token costs is to use open models rather than state-of-the-art proprietary ones, because they generally offer more flexibility and lower cost.

Silicon Valley meanwhile remains locked in heated debate over whether AI should be “open” or “closed.” Nvidia is among the most prominent tech giants backing open models and Meta Platforms on Monday announced a new open-weight model, Muse Glimmer.


Proprietary models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic or Google aren’t freely available for users to download and modify, while open-source and open-weight models are. True open-source models allow full access to training data and code, while open-weight models typically share only the numerical parameters, or “weights,” that underlie them.

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