| Hey, this is Saritha Rai, Asia AI reporter. The generative AI wave has swept all the way up to the high reaches of the Himalayas, where the kingdom of Bhutan has its first and only artificial intelligence startup. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Apple announced an M4 iMac with added AI, but still no 27-inch model
• Olympus CEO Stefan Kaufmann resigned after drug allegations probe
• Jeff Bezos offered a defense of his Washington Post withholding endorsement Ugyen Dendup, 23, and Jamphel Yigzin Samdrup, 19, are computer science engineering students at Thimphu’s Royal University of Bhutan. They won’t graduate until 2026, but they’ve already co-founded the tiny kingdom’s sole AI business: NoMindBhutan. Their venture is the product of a hackathon they won, with the duo using the prize money as seed capital to initiate a business building and deploying chatbots. Their headquarters are a college dorm room and their employees — five, so far — are fellow students. It took some effort for such a young group to earn credibility, but they secured the Bhutan National Bank as their first big customer and have added more since. It’s an encouraging, if tiny, step away from the total centralization of AI services in a few places of intensive investment. Data from Stanford’s 2024 AI Index show the US and China have poured in the largest sums of private money into AI over the past decade, dwarfing all other nations. Places like Bhutan don’t even make the list, of course, but it still feels essential for them to build their own tools. Silicon Valley investor and OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla recently warned that tech CEOs could hold unprecedented sway over global economic factors by virtue of their control of essential AI technologies. “Their platforms might become the primary mediators of work, education, and social interaction, potentially surpassing the role of traditional governments in many aspects of daily life,” Khosla wrote in a note titled AI Dystopia or Utopia. The Bhutan students built atop existing large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini, offering customized chatbots to the likes of Drukair and the Bank of Bhutan. The startup’s offer to local companies is to solve each of their customer service pain points using their own data. The kingdom, nestled between India and China, has just a handful of consumer commerce startups. The Bhutanese can hail a ride on their Uber equivalent, called DrukRide, or use a platform called ZheyGo to get meals delivered from local restaurants. Samuh Bhutan is the country’s Netflix. There’s plenty of imported tech, though, especially with social networks. The TikTok and Instagram of Bhutan are TikTok and Instagram. And LinkedIn is the means by which I reached Dendup and Samdrup.
Building bots tailored for Bhutan may not immediately seem like a booming business idea, given the population of less than a million people. And it’s certainly not been easy. You won’t find Bhutan on Microsoft Corp.’s list of countries with access to its Azure cloud, while payments provider Stripe Inc. also doesn’t operate in the country. So, NoMindBhutan hosts its tools on Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS cloud in Singapore, and the founders wire funds to friends in Australia, who in turn pay the Amazon server fees via Stripe. Customer expectations are only going to keep rising, after the startup built the bots for Bhutan’s airline and banks, letting users check flight timings, fares and interest rates. The student startup is now working on AI agents that can collaborate with humans in real time. The founders admit they feel the burden of also carrying the hopes of other young Bhutanese who may one day aspire to build AI tools themselves. Another hurdle they’ll need to overcome is the absence of large language data sets for the Bhutanese language, called Dzongkha. The founders plan to add voice eventually, once they get their hands on suitably large audio data in Dzongkha. But hope is also stirring because of an ambitious, AI-centric project in southern Bhutan, a green mega city called Gelephu Mindfulness City. It’s conceived and being built with the backing of the country’s influential monarch, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. The GMC, bordering India’s Assam state, is to be an economic and financial hub modeled along the lines of Singapore and is to be powered by artificial intelligence technologies and data centers. NoMindBhutan can expect, and probably will welcome, some homegrown competition before too long.—Saritha Rai BioWare, the Electronic Arts studio famed for making complex roleplaying games, is looking for redemption with this year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which comes out on Thursday. It comes after a pair of critically panned releases, which set up the latest Dragon Age entry as a high-stakes bet where the studio’s very existence is on the line.  OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says AI isn't experimental anymore. She says banks, financial institutions and fintech firms are using it every day in their business. Friar also talks about pricing, advertising and growing the business. She speaks to Ed Ludlow at the Money 20/20 Conference on Bloomberg Technology. The Biden administration finalized restrictions on investments by US individuals and companies into advanced technology in China. Meta is developing an AI-powered search engine, according to a report by the Information. Hong Kong unveiled its first policy guidelines on use of AI in finance and floated a tax break for virtual assets. Bitcoin traders are targeting the $70,000 mark again, which was last reached in June. DigitalBridge has agreed to buy British data center developer and operator Yondr Group Ltd. | 
