Why one of the world’s major AI pioneers is betting big on Saudi Arabia

Jürgen Schmidhuber is widely recognized as one of the early trailblazers of deep learning and neural network research.

He has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers and won the Neural Networks Pioneer award by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society .

In 2021 , he was appointed director of artificial intelligence at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology ( KAUST ) in Saudi Arabia .

All the basic techniques of modern AI , based on deep-learning artificial neural networks, were developed in Europe in the last millennium .

Commercial applications are now dominated by the U.S. and China , but anyone in the rest of the world can download or re-implement the old algorithms, improve them, and adapt them to country-specific applications.

Saudi Arabia has six times more people than it did 50 years ago , and six times as many women as in Europe or California .

The kingdom and its Public Investment Fund ( PIF ) are willing to invest enormous sums into AI .

KAUST researchers are currently developing an AI chemist that understands chemistry by “reading” chemistry papers, patents, and other documents.