Elie Metri, the CEO of Riyadh-based QSS AI & Robots, informed Enterprise Insider that “Sara is aware of that she’s a woman, she’s 25 years outdated, she’s 1.62 centimeters, she’s carrying Saudi clothes.”
Metri added: “She ought to be good, not speaking politics, not speaking intercourse as a result of we’re in Saudi Arabia. It should not go into these matters.”
Sara, who wears a conventional Saudi abaya, a modest robe-like costume, is the primary humanoid robotic designed and manufactured in Saudi Arabia and probably within the Center East.
She’s bilingual, talking each Arabic and English.
Metri mentioned Sara makes use of the corporate’s personal language studying mannequin — an AI program designed to acknowledge and generate textual content and speech.
LLMs are educated utilizing machine studying on enormous units of information.
“We do not depend on anybody else’s libraries, not even ChatGPT,” Metri informed BI.
Saudi Arabia’s authorized system relies on Sharia regulation, although there have been makes an attempt to modernize Saudi society lately.
These embrace enjoyable guidelines on costume codes and on ladies driving.
Nonetheless, ladies can nonetheless be punished for political activism, and discussions of intercourse and sexuality are off-limits.
Metri mentioned Sara garnered widespread consideration following her appearances at varied tech expos, successfully spotlighting Saudi Arabia’s developments in robotics and AI.
Nonetheless, an incident earlier this month involving the corporate’s different humanoid robotic, Muhammad, went actually viral.
In a video, the robotic appeared to increase a hand to the touch an Al Arabiya reporter’s bottom. She will be seen responding with a stern glare and a raised palm.
On X, social media customers accused the robotic of inappropriately touching the reporter.
“I’ve greater than six or seven pages of hyperlinks from across the globe,” mentioned Metri, who seemed to be unfazed by the media consideration.
He mentioned that, in particular person, it didn’t seem that Muhammad inappropriately touched the reporter.
“Whereas people are talking, we transfer arms, we aren’t mannequins,” he mentioned. “It is the identical for a robotic.”
Metri mentioned that, in his view, the robotic barely moved its hand and fingers whereas talking, and since the reporter was standing too near Muhammad, it flippantly touched her jacket.
“Sexual assault is completely completely different from a robotic hand touching the jacket of a girl,” he mentioned.
Regardless of the following social media frenzy, Metri mentioned he is not involved by the incident, and nor have been attendees of the DeepFest convention in Riyadh the place it occured.
“The weirdness is that in the entire Center East, even in Saudi Arabia, nobody noticed this as unhealthy as a result of they know it is a robotic,” he mentioned.
