AI Race Only Speeding Up, Not Slowing Down, Says Industry Executives

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) The global race to build artificial intelligence (AI) will keep accelerating, despite calls from some of the industry's most prominent figures to ease off, technology executives said.

“I don't see it slowing down very much,” said Matt Swalley, senior director for AI and HPC data storage infrastructure at Vdura, describing the field as“a race to who can develop these things the fastest”.

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Shady Khattab, director of AI sales, architecture and solution at Suse, an open-source software company, agreed.“I don't think it will slow the innovation,” he said.

Their view cuts against a growing chorus from within the industry.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman reportedly told employees the company is considering slowing cutting-edge AI development and hopes other labs will follow, though some may not agree.

In an interview with Time, Altman said he thinks“it is a good time to slow down” model development.

He has also suggested leading labs may be close to announcing a pact to slow development and address rising safety risks.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has urged companies to coordinate slowdowns as needed, and more than 1,000 staff across major AI firms signed a petition in July calling for a mechanism to slow development. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has also written that frontier companies must slow the pace, but only to a point where they still lead China. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, has said safety features can be added to current AI systems without slowing the pace of development.

Khattab said the calls were about governance, not a halt.

“Control doesn't mean by default to slow down, but it means to secure and to give the trust to that AI. None of them will stop innovation.” Organisations, he added, are attending because“AI is not a hype; it is the right tool,” he said on the sidelines of the AI Everything exhibition held in Abu Dhabi.

Sovereignty at the centre

Many organisations, he said, were building AI solutions before designing the architecture to govern them.

“The problem that we are facing right now is that the AI is evolving so fast, and everyone is looking forward to develop the solution faster than taking the time to architect that solution,” he said. Some pilot projects fail for that reason, he added.

He defined digital sovereignty as three elements:“compliance, and that's to stick with the right regulations and the laws; locality, and that's basically where your data will be; and freedom or mobility”, meaning the ability to switch models or vendors.

Local data centres, he said, were helping UAE companies meet the locality requirement. Sensitive data should stay in the country, either on-premise or with a UAE-based cloud provider.

Khattab said regional companies faced growing threats as AI advances, including identity theft, code breaches, data injection and data deletion.

Storage emerges as the bottleneck

Swalley said the industry's priorities had shifted.

“Two years ago, the conversation was how can I get GPUs (graphic processing units)? How can I deploy them as fast as possible? Now we're moving to how do I fund and generate revenue from all this investment,” he said.

As AI moves from training to inference, storage has become critical.

“Data storage really is that bottleneck,” he said.

He expects inference to account for 90 per cent of AI workloads by 2030, making it the revenue driver for AI cloud operators, whose goal is to keep every GPU in use.

He called the UAE a priority market.“You have the resources, you have energy, you have the expertise,” he said, citing the country's AI Strategy 2031.

Both executives were upbeat about AI's everyday impact.

Khattab pointed to healthcare, genomics and drone-assisted farming. Swalley said businesses can now build tools“in minutes that used to take months and months of production”.

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