Milei’s AI hype outpaces reality - Financial Times

Argentina is to become a "hub for artificial intelligence," according to President Javier Milei, a pledge the Financial Times has had the temerity to check against the actual economy. The FT's finding is that the country's AI push sits "far removed from the economies where foundational models are being developed" — which is a polite way of saying the hub is currently a press release with a flag on it. Every country wants to be an AI hub the way every pub wants to be a gastropub; the signage is cheap, the kitchen is the expensive bit.

The regulatory side, meanwhile, is going splendidly. Two dozen projects to regulate the technology are languishing in Argentina's Congress, a figure supplied by Fundar, who have presumably been counting them the way you count abandoned cars on a street. Languishing is the exact verb the FT chose, and it is doing a lot of heavy lifting: legislation doesn't get defeated in a deregulatory climate, it just gets left in a drawer until everyone forgets what it was for. Milei's anti-regulation stance has therefore produced the only policy outcome that requires no parliamentary arithmetic whatsoever — nothing.

What's left is the familiar global genre: the announcement, the photo, the word "hub." Foundational models are not built by decree, they are built by capital, chips, data and a power grid that doesn't flinch, and the FT is clear about which economies that describes. Argentina's offering, as reported, is essentially that it will not regulate the thing it does not yet have. There is something almost admirable in that level of confidence — a country promising to be the referee in a match it isn't playing in, on a ground it hasn't built, holding a whistle bought on credit. Two dozen bills in a drawer and a slogan on a podium; if that's a hub, we've all got one.