Welsh Politician Adam Price Says Small Size Gives Nations an Edge in AI Race at Growth Lab Talk

Adam Price, the Welsh Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy, argued that small nations can compete in the age of artificial intelligence by focusing on how technology is deployed at a Wednesday talk.

The talk, titled “Can Small Nations Compete and Win in the Age of AI?,” was hosted at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab and moderated by the lab’s director and HKS professor Ricardo Hausmann.

During the talk, Price focused on Wales’s economic history and its strategy for adopting new technologies. For Wales, Price said the pursuit to build frontier AI models is “the wrong race to watch.” He noted that a handful of American companies are expected to spend about $800 billion this year, mostly on data centers and chips, which is six times the entire gross value added of Wales.

“Wales is not going to win that race,” Price said. He added that neither the U.K. nor Europe could either.

Price argued that since frontier models are sold at roughly the same price around the world, access to intelligence will not determine which countries thrive and which do not. He pointed to Richard Price, a Welsh philosopher who in 1761 applied an essay on probability by Thomas Bayes to his work as a London life insurer.

“Bayes had the idea and left it in a drawer,” Price said. “Price was the friend who applied the idea to a real-world problem.”

Price said successful AI adaptation depends on five elements working together: power, data, skilled people, public consent, and firms and public services willing to redesign how they work.

“Every chain maker knows a chain has no average strength,” Price said. “It has a weakest link.”

Price said small nations are better equipped to coordinate AI integration because their size forces them to be able to adapt.

“Small nations are better placed than larger ones to put those links together,” Price said. “We have a small home market. It forces us to trade, and that trade means that we have to be agile because we are sensitive to changing market conditions.”

But with only three million people, Price said Wales cannot sustain leading specialists in every field and historically became “stuck” in coal and steel. Price said AI could lessen the cost by putting specialist knowledge within reach of ordinary firms.

Price described Wales as a nation where decision makers are close enough to the population that “they can see each other’s work in a much more direct way.”

“For us, it has a real economic value because you can create that synergistic collaboration, which is the core of economic development,” Price said.

Price pointed to Wales’s health data bank, which has digitized hospital and primary care records, and said it drew little of the privacy concerns that a similar effort in England faced.

“There is no issue, and it shows the way in which, if you get it right, small nations are able to leverage their sense of connectedness both across different contexts and also as a society as a whole.”