Tarek Gara.

Ten AI models grade Middle Eastern politics every day. I made them take the test themselves — and one sentence decided whether they answered.

The MVP began as a survival tactic for startups with no money and no users. Now the richest companies in the world can use it to ship below a bar they could clear, let machines grade machines, and turn users into unpaid quality assurance.

Saudi Arabia is buying AI infrastructure at historic scale, and a frustrated Saudi user just explained better than any analyst why the chips are the easy part: the Arabic training corpus is thin, half of it is translated English, and the model's own rules forbid it the conversations its users actually want.

كتبتُه في خضمّ الجائحة، حين انتقلت المدارس فجأةً إلى الشاشات: التعليم عن بُعد ليس وليد كورونا ولا الإنترنت، بل حلقةٌ في سلسلةٍ بدأت من البريد. وربّما كان التعلّم الذاتيّ، لا المدرسة، هو مستقبل المعرفة.