Welcome to the era of AI nationalism

The hottest technology of 2023 had a busy last few weeks of the year. On November 28th Abu Dhabi launched a new state-backed artificial-intelligence company, AI71, that will commercialise its leading “large language model” (LLM), Falcon. On December 11th Mistral, a seven-month-old French AI startup, announced a blockbuster $400m funding round, which insiders say will value the firm at over $2bn. Four days later Krutrim, a new Indian startup, unveiled India’s first multilingual LLM, barely a week after Sarvam, a five-month-old one, raised $41m to build similar Indian-language models.