AI-technologies as a Basis for Ensuring Technological Sovereignty: Challenges and Threats for the EAEU Countries

Abstract

The article devotes to the problem of ensuring technological sovereignty. Aim and tasks. Identify the key methods that allow the United States to preserve their technological dominance and determine the trajectory for creating an AI ecosystem that is independent of Western technologies. Methods. The author used the following research methods: critical discourse analysis, content analysis, and system analysis. Results. Despite the fact that Chinese high-tech companies are successfully competing with American IT-corporations, the United States continue to firmly hold the global technological leadership, which gives them the opportunity not only to decide with which countries and under what conditions to share their technologies, but also to control global information flows. This author sees a particular danger in the proliferation of large language models that have been developed by leading American IT-corporations. These models, while being trained on Western texts, become an extremely convenient tool for exporting Western values to countries with a completely different cultural and civilizational code, which only exacerbates the ideological and cultural hegemony of the countries of the collective West. The article shows that both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have developed their own large language models, but they are based on the American the most popular model called LLaMA1. In Russia, after the beginning of a special military operation and the withdrawal of many leading Western IT-companies from the Russian market, domestic developers were forced to offer their own technological solutions. However, the gap from Western AI-developers is about a year. Conclusion. Russian research and development in the field of advanced information technologies are still fragmental in nature, due to the high costs of training of AI-models from the very beginning. In this regard, the author suggests considering the possibility of joining the efforts of high-tech companies of the EAEU member-states in order to develop end-to-end AI-technologies that would be able to meet the most urgent demands of all partner countries and encourage the further strengthening of Eurasian integration.