Geopolitics Influencing Generative AI Models and Shaping the New World Order

The emergence of generative AI marks a transformational moment that will influence the course of markets and alter the balance of power among nations. Increasingly capable machine intelligence will profoundly impact matters of growth, productivity, competition, national defence, and human culture. In this swiftly evolving arena, corporate and political leaders alike are seeking to decipher the implications of this abrupt and powerful wave of innovation, exploring new opportunities and navigating new risks.

The world is facing a narrow window of opportunity what we call the inter-AI years to shape the AI-enabled future. This window will be brief for few years at most then views and strategies will harden, norms, values, standards will be embedded within the technology and the costs of changing course will rise. While AI-enabled technology will continue to progress, decisions made today will determine what is possible in the future.

The US and China are the world’s top AI competitors, but they are also the top AI collaborators. However, in generative AI, most of the cutting-edge innovations today are coming from the US, and China faces an uphill in training large language models (LLMs), for now. This technology competition will see geopolitical priorities drive economic decision-making, including through export controls, sanctions, tariffs, industrial policy, investment screening, and other measures deployed to increase absolute and relative advantages.

Geopolitical swing states will have a meaningful role in shaping the AI-enabled future. In particular, the UK, the UAE, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, and India are key players in the category. Moreover, these players may form innovation blocs, creating alliances and partnerships with more dominant states or cooperating with each other to pursue common goals.

The technology development will shape its geopolitical effects. New capabilities will lead to novel use cases and broader impact. We expect generative AI models to become increasingly multimodal, seamlessly reckoning with text, images, audio, and video. Focus will also shift toward performance and value engineering, making this technology less costly and more sustainable. The incorporation of persistent memory will enable better long-range planning and true agentic scenarios.

Perhaps the timeliest question is whether generative AI will follow a scale-up trajectory, with models increasing in size and likely dominated by large commercial enterprises, or whether they will scale down, favouring a broader set of providers and open-source approaches. The most profound impact of generative AI may be on economic growth.

In today’s world, AI is used to generate desired political and social outcomes and even shape public opinion. This means that day by day, the value of our decisions is decreasing and we are automatically becoming the victims of AI-based decisions, which is then affecting and shaping our lives. Geopolitics is not anymore just in the hands of world leaders as these leaders have been enthusiastically relying on big data and making massive investments in technologies which can develop their nation’s artificial intelligence system and thereby make important geopolitical decisions.

It is safe to say that countries in the global North are now in a full swing competition to get ahead of each other by influencing geopolitics without always inclining on traditional warfare. Although traditional warfare is not off the table, tackling geopolitics by deploying AI is surely a priority now. Thus, the world is moving toward an interface between AI and geopolitics, where we will get to witness geopolitical strategies and goals being formulated, influenced, and achieved with the help of AI which will eventually lead to a remarkable shift in the overall world order.

AI is being used by the US military to optimize budgeting decisions as well as equipment maintenance. It is being used by intelligence analysts to swiftly sift through massive amounts of data in order to find pertinent patterns that help them make decisions more quickly and with more accuracy. Americans should anticipate that AI will alter military tactics in the future, both for the US and its enemies. In summary, the security revolution that AI has sparked is only now beginning to take shape.

Concerned about the risks associated with AI, several researchers have advocated for a halt to the development of the technology as it has become more widely known. However, it is impossible to halt the advancement of AI in America due to the pervasive mathematical underpinnings of the field, the widespread proliferation of human skill sets for developing AI models, and the formidable forces driving AI research and development accelerating commercial gain and human ingenuity alike. Attempting to halt progress would also be incorrect strategy.

China is putting a lot of effort toward overtaking the US in AI, especially in the area of military use. If it is successful, Beijing will have a far more potent force than the US, one that may be able to rival US operations in terms of both pace and impact.

In conclusion, the intersection of geopolitics and generative AI is shaping a new world order. The decisions made today will have lasting impacts on the future of AI and its role in global power dynamics. As nations compete and collaborate, the influence of AI on geopolitics will continue to grow, driving innovation and shaping the future of international relations.