Bushati-Leka in 'Public Square': Artificial Intelligence, with influence on the world's geostrategic players

2026-01-30 22:00:00, Politikë CNA

Bushati-Leka in 'Public Square': Artificial Intelligence, with

Ditmir Bushati and Albanian-American Donald Leka held a conversation at the launch of the new season of the 'Public Square' podcast on 'Artificial Intelligence and the Coming Wave'.

During the conversation, the impact that this important technological development has on geopolitics was emphasized, which is evident at the regional level and beyond.

Bushati: Donald, I sometimes use artificial intelligence, but we usually use it with information that has been collected from the past. As far as I understand, the focus of your work is mainly related to the future?

Leka: We have been very focused on advance intelligence, and specifically on predicting, for example, geopolitical events in the world; events that affect supply chains, that affect markets, stability within jurisdictions, bilateral stress between jurisdictions. So, it could be at a local level with neighboring countries or regional countries; it could also be with regional powers that have significant influence within a region, as well as geostrategic players like the United States and China, and from a military standpoint Russia, or from a destabilization standpoint there.

And if you look at artificial intelligence today, there's also been a big focus on two other areas: one is data centers, and data centers require huge capital investments. And not just for the data centers, but for the supporting infrastructure, the power grid, and everything that supports them. And of course robotics is another area. So robotics benefits enormously from as much information as possible in terms of the natural or physical world.

And the kind of data that we're talking about, and this is an important point, is that LLMs rely heavily on data that's just online, or let's say academic studies, expert opinions in universities, but it's all in the realm of language, it's all verbal. We rely heavily on sensor data, which you could think of as data that's not manipulated by human beings, or hyper-local data within jurisdictions.

The second aspect of our data is that it is cross-sectional. So an isolated approach to understanding the precursors to an event has consistently failed. And the consequences of these kinds of failed predictions, whether by government policymakers or corporations, in the case of governments, they can result in the deaths of millions of people or the displacement of millions of people as refugees or IDPs in countries.

In terms of the corporate side, this can result in making investments or committing to certain strategies that, if you had all the data, you would know in advance that that strategy wouldn't work. So the idea is really to give decision makers the best possible information so that they can make the best possible decisions. They can reduce risk and they can increase alpha or opportunity. /CNA