Russia is pushing to grow its own artificial-intelligence talent at home, even as two big obstacles stand in the way: limited access to the specialized hardware that powers modern AI, and a steady loss of top technical experts to other countries.
That is the picture painted by Nikita Ostrovsky in a report for Time. According to Time, the country is trying to build a domestic pipeline of AI specialists at the same time it struggles with scarce AI hardware and a "brain drain" of skilled engineers and researchers leaving Russia.
The report opens with a scene from early April, when a moderator took the stage at one of Russia's annual events in the southwestern outskirts of Moscow — a snapshot of the public effort the country is making to promote and develop AI skills internally.
The tension at the heart of the story is straightforward. Training and running advanced AI systems typically requires powerful, hard-to-obtain chips, and it requires people who know how to build with them. Russia, by Time's account, is short on both at once. Cultivating local talent is one lever a country can pull when the other inputs are constrained.
Why it matters: AI capability is increasingly tied to national competitiveness and defense, so a major power trying to develop AI expertise at home — while cut off from key hardware and losing skilled workers — is a signal of how export limits and talent flows are reshaping the global technology landscape.