On December 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived at Sber City on Kutuzovsky Prospekt to take part in the conference “Journey to the World of Artificial Intelligence,” where he spent about two hours. What the Russian president was really thinking about is only suggested by a special correspondent for Kommersant. Andrey Kolesnikov.
An exhibition of intellectual achievements was held on the first and second floors of building G of Sber City on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Here the robo-parkour stood out – a dog that, apparently, could climb onto a small podium and this was interesting. The employee in charge of the dog asked me:
-Where can this be useful? Wheeled robots are now, of course, much faster and more reliable than our walking ones. But imagine a staircase. The wheeled one will not climb on it!
Here the walking dog, in confirmation of these words, jumped onto the podium and somehow neatly, I would say, deftly slid off it. However, having taken another step, he turned over on his back and froze helplessly, as if he had pretended to be dead in the face of some mortal danger. The dog handler sighed and returned it to working condition.
“It’s under development,” he said, it seemed, with sincere sympathy, looking at the dog. “All over the world they are trying to make a robot that could walk on any terrain: both rough terrain and stairs…
“It looks like you have something to strive for,” I suggested carefully.
“It turned over at the end, yes,” the dog handler agreed. “That’s understandable!” Unlike a wheeled one, it has too many degrees of freedom! This is the problem! A person has thousands of muscles. Each one is controlled by us. That’s why we don’t fall. If we relax, we will fall. Our freedom is our problem. We walking systems are vulnerable. But more passable!
The guy did not lose heart and hoped for the best.
At another stand, a voice was cloned. It was necessary to pronounce a control phrase with which a “cast” of your voice could be made and reproduced, for example, in the form of a tongue twister: “Kosovars cook coconut juice in short-coconut cookers.” “The strip about palace was replaced by two half-strips about vacuum cleaners.” The tongue twisters made no sense, and my voice in them did not resemble my voice. But I didn’t lose heart either.
“Scammers also cloned my voice some time ago,” I admitted. “To be honest, it was more like it.”
“We only had three seconds to record your speech,” the head of the stand shook his head. “And what did you say: “I saw Putin, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief!” And the scammers had plenty of time and, apparently, samples of your other speech, which was completely different. This is all clear! Of course, in the end it looks more like it!
There was no annoyance in his original voice. There was an awareness of reality.
At the next stand, a Chinese student asked to show him President Xi Jinping in 3D projection, with a teddy bear in his hands in Tiananmen Square. It was done. The teddy bear turned out well, but Xi Jinping’s face was badly bruised.
– How so? – I asked later, when the Chinese student walked away in some confusion.
“We had to glue four pictures into one neural representation,” another developer explained to me. “There are, of course, disadvantages.” Yes, the face is dented, as you said. This is true. But that’s how he looks like! Anyone will say that this is Xi Jinping with a teddy bear. And I’m not telling you that we are standing still! We taught the computer to understand 3D objects as an entity! With the help of description we can create non-existent objects! And especially presidents! I’ll tell you more: today we even generated German Gref!
German Gref was, of course, of greater value to this man than any president. Maybe that’s how it was.
German Gref himself and Vladimir Putin also walked through the exhibition. He didn’t see the dog. It was a different exhibition.
— In 2019 (at the same conference.— A.K.) you became the first president in the world to talk about strong artificial intelligence,” developer Mikhail told him.
Everyone else apparently spoke about the weak, underestimating artificial intelligence.
“But then we didn’t understand how close it all was!” – Mikhail exclaimed.
“Come on,” Mr. Putin interrupted him. “Maybe I didn’t understand that.” But you understood everything.
And he nodded at Mr. Gref.
German Gref had no one to point to.
“We thought it was ten plus… But it turned out… And now everyone is saying: the horizon is three to five years…” Mikhail shook his head. “And in scale, it feels like it’s on the level of a nuclear project, a space program!” Artificial intelligence has already compared to humans in terms of broad skills, and the volume of investment is larger than a nuclear project… Microsoft invested more than $100 billion… They just bought a nuclear power plant to power a supercomputer… There is already such a scale.
Vladimir Putin became serious. How is this a nuclear power plant? Don’t we have nuclear power plants? Have nothing to eat?
I immediately began to miss Alexey Likhachev (head of Rosatom.— “Kommersant”). Vladimir Putin even seemed to look around in search of him.
“The first level of artificial intelligence is the perception of generation,” Mikhail explained meanwhile. “Text, images… We have been talking about this for the last two years.” The achievements of this year were logical reasoning… The second was understanding the world around. Third – agents. The fourth is incarnation.
This is apparently what artificial intelligence is now capable of. And I remembered, of course, the dog. She did not yet fit into this picture of the new world.
“The models learned to get into the documents, the regulations,” Mikhail irreparably relaxed, “and, most importantly, they learned chains of reasoning.” And they get a reliable answer. The second achievement of the year is understanding the physical world around us! With the help of generating 3D models (yeah, this is about the chairman with a bear.— A.K.) we achieve strong results!
The next interlocutor was Denis.
“Gigachat, the artificial intelligence of Sber, is among the top five neural network models in the world,” he explained. “We teach it expert knowledge, and then it passes exams—secondary and high schools.” He can now read, write, hear and see.
And what else does it seem… (I wanted to say – a person) need?
“Our Gigachat can free up ten hours a week for a teacher,” Denis continued. “Or everyday problems with China can be resolved.” Diana will show you… We arrive at the restaurant…
“We have a menu entirely in Chinese,” Diana nodded. “Gigachat, translate this menu into Russian for me.”
“Peking duck,” Vladimir Putin inserted.
Translated the menu.
Meanwhile, a menu appeared on the big screen. There was no Peking duck here. It seems Vladimir Putin has been ignored.
“But here’s a smart ring,” Denis continued. “It takes all the parameters of the body.” I also use it to monitor activity. Here it shows the level of stress… Well, my stress is elevated.
This was, of course, already noticeable.
“So this is such an event… Responsible,” Denis agreed.
“And here’s a smart camera,” said German Gref, holding some yellow devices in his hands. “In the ear, in the nose, in the throat… Skin diseases… You can send it to the doctor, and there will be a diagnosis right away, and artificial intelligence gives second diagnosis…
Vladimir Putin did not insert the yellow device into the ear.
“Remote monitoring,” explained Denis, hinting, it seems, that it was in vain. “Reduces mortality by 30%.
“We started doing it in Udmurtia, in a village where three thousand people lived,” said Mr. Gref, “and it turned out that in two hours every resident visited a first aid station, from which there was a connection with a doctor in Izhevsk.
Mr. Putin, it seems, already regretted that he had neglected the device in the ear.
At another stand, Gigachat was processing citizens’ requests for the upcoming direct line with the President of Russia. And then staggering numbers emerged.
“Here are the data for the direct line in 2023,” explained another interlocutor of Vladimir Putin. “A quarter of the requests have not been sorted out.”
He said something casually, but now I couldn’t think about anything else. How so? Didn’t dismantle it in a year? But they promised.
However, Gigachat sorted it out. True, people addressed them to the president.
“We can imagine how the paintings of Russian artists come to life and speak to us,” another developer told Vladimir Putin, using the example of Viktor Vasnetsov’s work “Three Heroes.”
Three heroes on the screen from the picture suddenly galloped somewhere. Yes, but where? For what? Where will they stay?
“And here’s my favorite,” the developer then admitted. “New Year’s greetings… From everyone’s favorite character…
Mr. Putin nodded. Whatever, he was ready for anything.
“From Umka,” the developer reassured him.
Umka, however, turned out to be speechless. However, he was filled with kindness. So there was a point in such an appeal. And even more.
Tatyana from T-Bank spoke about education in the field of artificial intelligence.
— Thanks to our technologies, each person can have a personal tutor in an individual subject… He can help him learn to think!.. We invest in education from the very beginning, from the very basics, from school!..
“You are missing one important link…” said the president.
– Kindergarten? – Tatiana asked nervously.
– No. Technical school,” explained Vladimir Putin.
– Yes. Agree! – Tatyana picked up. – But we have our own pride – Central University!
It was no longer possible to argue with this, and most importantly, there was no need.
And I remembered how they talked about the last achievement of this morning, the T-Bank on the first floor of the exhibition a couple of hours ago. “The T-Technology Group presented the world’s best open large language models in Russian… The effectiveness has been confirmed by various industrial benchmarks…” said the bank’s press release.
The news was discussed at the stands.
“The “Chinese” were retrained,” knowledgeable people explained to each other.
Or, in other words, competitors.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has already spoken at the Sberbank international conference “Journey to the World of Artificial Intelligence.”
— I would like to note that in the past year alone, artificial intelligence technologies have significantly transformed the appearance of entire industries. For example, creative, so-called creative industries, where, it would seem, a person with his sense of harmony and beauty was absolutely irreplaceable. To be honest, it seemed to me that this was impossible, but now these boundaries are being erased,” said Vladimir Putin.
And it seemed to me – with some kind of vengeful satisfaction.
“So,” he continued, “generative (and, of course, I heard the prefix “de-.”— A.K.) models create high-quality music in various genres, synchronously translate oral speech into dozens of languages in real time, produce videos that can no longer be distinguished from real-world filming, create video games based on text or pictures, as well as 3D models, digital doubles complex systems. In essence, this means an upcoming revolution in engineering, in the design and construction of fundamentally new components and entire devices.
Why did it become sad? Yes, from all this. It’s a shame for the musicians. They are approaching journalists.
— Based on new solutions, Sber presented the Gigachat MAX service, and Yandex presented the fourth generation of Chat GPT. T-Bank, MTS, and VK have advanced in the development of their neural models. You know, the restrictions that are being introduced in relation to Russia, the Russian economy, push us to find new solutions, and you find them! — the president encouraged those sitting in the hall.
I kept trying to understand what the power of artificial intelligence is?
— What is the fundamental feature of the leap that artificial intelligence algorithms have made? — Mr. Putin seemed to ask again. “Now only my colleagues told me about this: they learned to reason, to logically express their thoughts (for colleagues this was truly an event.” A.K.), that is, generative artificial intelligence has significantly improved its cognitive and thinking abilities!
Yes, there are big fans of artificial intelligence in this room.
The President formulated a proposal:
— Conduct an international foresight in Russia, a kind of strategic session (what wonderful words! — A.K.) about the future of artificial intelligence, in order to think together about the direction in which such powerful technologies will develop further.
Then experts in the field of artificial intelligence told the president and colleagues for at least an hour how artificial intelligence is needed both here and here.
But I think that all this time Vladimir Putin was actually thinking about what our response would be to a missile attack on a military airfield near Taganrog, in the Rostov region.
Shouldn’t we smell the “Oreshnik”, you know?