"Uzbekistan is already moving in the right direction," says Ruslan Salahutdinov on AI and the future of the region

During ICT Week Uzbekistan, Meta’s Vice President of AI Research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, discussed which achievements have been key to the development of AI and what will help countries in the region stay competitive in the global technology race.

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Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Vice President of AI Research at Meta

Key AI Breakthroughs in Recent Years

In the last two to three years, several significant breakthroughs in AI have already occurred.

The first is engineering. We have learned to build transformer-based neural network systems by training them on the entire internet. This demonstrates that models begin to produce meaningful results when trained on massive amounts of data.

The second breakthrough is what is known as test-time inference. This occurs when a model attempts to find its own answer during the generation process through extended reasoning. Such models are already achieving outstanding results, winning mathematical and physics olympiads.

The third breakthrough is synthetic data generation. These are data created autonomously by models, which are then used to train the models further.

However, reaching the level of general or superintelligence will require new, fundamentally different breakthroughs. We will continue to advance based on current achievements, but for the next qualitative leap, something entirely new is needed. Currently, both the academic community and the industry are actively trying to understand what these next steps might be.

How countries like Uzbekistan can keep up with the AI race

Uzbekistan is already moving in the right direction. I see this from who attends events like this one and the questions the audience asks.

There are several key factors.

First, education. It is important to give students and young people the opportunity to engage in research work in the field of artificial intelligence.

Second, startup development — creating conditions under which young specialists can implement their own ideas and build their projects.

And finally, attracting major technology companies — it is necessary to stimulate the opening of their branches in the country so that specialists can gain experience and work at a global level.