Putin stresses establishment of sovereign Palestinian state

TEHRAN, Nov. 28 (MNA) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a message to Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas that the key to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.

"It is in this (the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state within the 1967 borders) that we see the key condition for achieving a comprehensive, long-term and just Palestinian-Israeli settlement," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov read out the Russian president's message to Abbas at an event marking the Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People at the Palestinian Embassy in Russia, Sputnik reported.

In the text of the telegram published on the Kremlin's website, Putin stressed that "now, when the bloody conflict is bringing untold suffering to the peaceful population of Palestine, I consider it particularly important to reaffirm Russia's consistent position in favor of the realization of the legitimate rights of your people to establish their own sovereign state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem (Quds) as its capital."

The Israeli regime unleashed a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 in response to the besieged territory-based Resistance groups' Operation al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories.

The latest aggression against Gaza killed nearly 15,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are women and children.

MNA

Putin takes aim at West’s “AI monopoly”

November 28, 2023

Scott Nover

President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of artificial intelligence and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly.

 Reuters

Vladimir Putin wants Russia to rival the West on AI development. On Friday at the Artificial Intelligence Journey conference in Moscow, the Russian president vowed to sign off on a new AI strategy, which would see his government pour money into supercomputers and educational initiatives. Moscow’s strategy would focus on generative AI and large language models, a field dominated by American firms such as Google and OpenAI.

Putin’s speech was both a statement of intent and a critique of the West’s dominance of modern technology. “Monopolistic dominance of such foreign technology in Russia is unacceptable, dangerous, and inadmissible,” Putin said, noting that “monopoly and domination” of AI by foreign powers is “unacceptable and dangerous.”

Russia is lagging in the AI race. By one count of “significant machine learning systems” cited by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, the US leads the world with 16 such systems, followed by the UK with eight, and China with three. Russia, meanwhile, has just one.

Russia has its own AI chatbots hoping to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, such as GigaChat from the state-owned financial services company Sberbank. But Moscow has meddled in the affairs of its private technology firms, including Yandex, the so-called “Google of Russia,” for its namesake search engine. Yandex, now owned by a Dutch holding company, is in the process of divesting from its Russian assets after clashing with Moscow’s censors. With Yandex largely left out of Moscow’s AI planning due to deep-seated distrust, Russia has funneled its AI ambitions through state-owned firms like Sberbank and made limited progress in jumpstarting its domestic AI development.

Moscow may be serious about funding AI development, but that would require Putin to loosen his chokehold on Russian industry – which is about as likely as him sharing eggnog with Zelensky this Christmas.