Armenia has great potential in AI - AI Fund General Manager Carlos Alzate

Armenia, being a small country, has a fairly high per capita index of talent in artificial intelligence, Dr. Carlos Alzate, AI Fund senior advisor & general manager, told NEWS.am TECH at the Global Innovation Forum held in Yerevan.

Armenia has great potential in the AI field

"There is a lot of potential here and it's going to be exponentially increasing. The main challenge now is to channel all these efforts into things that matter. There is a huge interest in commercializing artificial intelligence the proper way, using AI for good purposes. And I think all those things need to be challenged," said Alzate, who also heads the AI Fund's technical center in Colombia.

Seeing this potential, AI Fund invested in two Armenian companies whose work is mainly based on artificial intelligence. One of them is 10Web, which specializes in making websites. The other is called Podcastle, which is based on podcasts and uses AI-based applications for operations such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, etc.

According to Alzate, Armenian companies are performing very well in this field and should continue at this pace.

He added that being a small country, Armenia has a great 'ecosystem in artificial intelligence, which is 'well-connected' and has very 'relevant applications' of artificial intelligence.

Alzate said that Armenian companies are solving very complex problems and have proven that they can create products that are of great commercial importance.

AI challenges Armenia may face

According to Alzate, one of the main challenges for Armenian companies dealing with artificial intelligence is to be able to enter the global market.

"Artificial intelligence is a globalized market. For instance, the two companies in which we have invested, have a global market presence, and I am not sure if it's the same for the bulk of Armenian companies. I think the main challenge is how to penetrate other markets like Europe, the Americas, Asia, etc.," he noted.

The general manager said he sees great potential in Armenia in natural language processing and everything related to language and speech.

A strong link between the IT industry and academia

Alzate says that there should be a strong link between the labor market and the education sector so that engineers receive a proper education and are ready to work on urgent problems after graduating from university.

"There needs to be a strong link between the AI industry and academia because the field is growing at an explosive pace and we will that education is not going up in the same way," he noted.

According to him, many universities do not train such personnel.

AI Fund implements many projects in education. The main manager-shareholder of the fund, Andrew Ng, who was previously the co-founder and head of Google Brain, is also from the field of education.

Dr. Carlos Alzate noted that they now work on the AI application, which helps humanity to move forward. For example, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions through the optimization of sea transport routes, to help people get rid of excess weight through artificial intelligence, and other applications in the healthcare field.

Global trends in AI

Artificial intelligence is now widely used in the field of natural language processing, says Carlos Alzate, noting that with the help of artificial intelligence today, the copy is created that is difficult to guess whether it was done by a person or not.

It can be said that there was a huge explosion in this field, he added noting that many startups are created, which solve such complex problems that were very difficult to solve before. For example, a summary of the text. Years ago, such a thing could mostly be done by a person. It is very difficult for a computer to properly summarize a text, AI Fund General Manager added.