I Proposed to Create an Artificial Intelligence City in Armenia: David Yan

I proposed to create an Artificial Intelligence city in Armenia. This was stated by physicist, founder of ABBYY, and president of Newo.ai, David Yan, during an interview with Petros Ghazaryan on Public TV.

“We had a very interesting conversation about Artificial Intelligence, and besides various topics, I shared the idea of an Artificial Intelligence city. This will be a city in Armenia that will attract great minds from all over the world. In order to make Armenia such a place, we must create conditions that will draw hundreds and thousands of the best brains from around the world to Armenia. This has happened in places like Silicon Valley, where 80 percent of migrants are newcomers, which can attract Artificial Intelligence scientists to Armenia, to any place, based on one thing: data that does not exist anywhere else.

What data is missing? Primarily, biological data. These are so-called multimodal data, where when a person says something, you can already scan and understand their blood type, hormone levels, and oxygen concentration in their blood. If we correlate these genomic-level data with thousands of people, we will understand what happens in the human body when a person is ill or in love. Such data does not exist anywhere in the world because these are confidential and personal data.

What can be done? For example, we could have an enclave, a separate city in Armenia where scientists can relocate with their families and gain access to this data, contributing their own data. For instance, 25,000 families from 100 countries move to this city and agree to contribute their biological and other data to the city’s database. In this city, we will have humanoid robots, flying robots, and self-driving cars. People will work, live, go to restaurants, and lead normal lives there.

This limited area will house about 75,000 people; however, all their data will be collected, and only the scientists residing there will have access to this data because they are the ones who provided it to the database. This would be an experimental city on Earth, and the data collected would be enormous. Therefore, as we calculated, we would need to build a modern small nuclear plant, coupled with wind farms and solar panels, but even that power would not be enough because the servers will require significant energy. This will be the world’s largest information cluster. The servers will generate so much heat that it will be enough to heat the city.

But if we build such a project and agree that each country will invest in this city, it would be similar to the International Space Station. The number of scientific publications and discoveries will be unprecedented. Armenia will be on the front pages of newspapers. I shared these ideas with Prime Minister Pashinyan and several ministers, and they were all very intrigued by it,” said David Yan.