A World Bank expert thinks countries should leverage ‘small AI’—and avoid competing with the biggest tech giants

AI is expensive. Processors are expensive, data centers are expensive, power and water are expensive, data acquisition is expensive. Giants like the U.S. and China can bear these costs. But can other smaller regions—like Southeast Asia, home to the largest group of unconnected people in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa—keep up?

Yet experts at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, last week were hopeful that smaller countries could invest in AI that works for them, even as they pointed out many of the constraints that still held back investment.

“There’s an opportunity to really leverage what has come to be known as ‘small AI,’ which is much more targeted, potentially suitable for offline use, and doesn’t necessarily compete with some of the large innovations we’r