NEW YORK: Minister of State and Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) chairman Bilal Bin Saqib on Thursday met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the UNGA sidelines in New York, where the two discussed Pakistan’s potential role in the global artificial intelligence economy.
In a post on X, the PVARA chairman said the meeting discussed AI infrastructure, education, skills development and talent, as well as opportunities for deeper engagement with OpenAI.
The discussion also focused on how Pakistan could expand its participation in the global AI economy by leveraging its young workforce, digital capacity and other resources.
A day earlier, speaking at the Social Business, Youth and Technology Forum during the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Saqib delivered a keynote on the choice now facing emerging economies as the rules of global finance are rewritten.
He said that artificial intelligence and tokenisation can become the developing world’s most powerful engines of financial inclusion, stressing the need to make them accessible to those excluded from traditional financial systems.
The gap, the keynote argued, was no longer one of technology but of rails and of rules, and of the willingness to build them.
