The AI revolution is leaving Latin America behind. Can the region catch up?
Latin America makes up 6.3% of the world economy but accounts for only 1.6% of global investment in AI, according to the study commissioned by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
It's the region investing the least in AI. While the United States spends $78 billion a year, Asia $61 billion, Europe $22 billion and the Middle East and Africa combined $3.6 billion, Latin America invests only $2.6 billion a year in AI, the study says.
Even worse, AI investments fell in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Peru between 2019 and 2023, the study says. Brazil currently leads the region's AI spending with $1.1 billion, followed by Mexico ($660 million), Chile ($163 million), Argentina ($146 million), Colombia ($136 million) and Peru ($77 million.)
Despite these sobering numbers, there's relatively little public debate in the region about its AI challenges. I follow Latin America's news daily and rarely see presidents warning about the dangers of remaining passive amid the greatest technological revolution in centuries.
Recently, several top tech entrepreneurs told me that Latin America is so far behind in AI that it should focus on its competitive advantages: food, other commodities, energy and tourism. Countries should stick to traditional exports and add value to them, they argued.
Luis Von Ahn, the Guatemalan-born billionaire who founded the CAPTCHA online security test and the 500 million-user Duolingo language platform, told me he doesn't know of a single large language model developed in Latin America — not even a more modest version of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or China's DeepSeek. 'Everything is being done in the United States and China, and a bit in Europe,' he said.
Even more worrisome, some Latin American countries are investing in call centers and customer support firms, industries doomed to be replaced by AI, he warned. 'That's a huge waste of time. Call centers are likely to vanish within five years,' he told me.
When I asked him what Latin American countries should do, Von Ahn recommended developing AI applications to make key industries like agriculture and tourism more efficient.
'Even with the smartest AI, tourism will survive and humans will keep eating avocados,' Von Ahn told me. 'That's where I'd focus, not on outsourcing.'
Raúl Katz, co-author of the new ECLAC study and director of business strategy research at Columbia University's Institute for Tele-Information, told me that — whether in traditional or new industries — countries have no choice but to invest in AI adoption.
'If Latin American companies don't ramp up AI use in billing, logistics, distribution and supply chain processes, they'll fall even further behind and so will their countries' economies,' Katz warned.
The region's biggest problem is that more than 95% of its companies are small or medium-sized firms, which lack the money or skilled staff to adopt AI and boost productivity.
Building data centers matters, but 'the main obstacle isn't infrastructure — it's companies' capacity to adopt new technologies,' he said.
The solution, he added, is to invest in tech institutes across each country to help small businesses adopt AI, like Germany and Japan do, and to boost college graduation rates. While 52% of Americans over 25 have a college degree, only 22% of Brazilians and Mexicans do, according to ECLAC.
Asked about Von Ahn's suggestion to focus on food and tourism, Katz said that AI adoption is essential even there.
'To add value to your agricultural exports, you'll need AI,' he said. 'There are many ways in which you can increase your yields in agriculture using AI to measure the soil's humidity and estimate how much fertilizer or seeds you will need.'
In short, Latin America's choice isn't between commodities or technology. It's about adopting AI to boost productivity across all industries.
If Latin America keeps sleepwalking through the AI revolution, it will face massive job losses, slower economic growth and a new wave of migration. Either the region puts AI at the top of its agenda, or its future will look grimmer than its present.
Don't miss the 'Oppenheimer Presenta' TV show on Sundays at 9 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: andresoppenheimer.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
3 minutes ago
- Forbes
5 ChatGPT Prompts To Help You Come Up With Startup Business Ideas
By Richard D. Harroch and Dominique A. Harroch The spark of a great startup often begins with a simple idea—but coming up with a truly viable and innovative business idea can be daunting. Fortunately, tools like ChatGPT are now changing how aspiring entrepreneurs can explore new business opportunities, validate concepts, and generate startup ideas across a range of industries. Instead of staring at a blank notebook, you can now use AI to help you think creatively, test market viability, and refine your thinking across sectors like healthcare, tech, education, logistics, hospitality, apps, software, and more. The key is learning how to prompt ChatGPT in a way that gives you not only creative ideas, but ideas grounded in trends, consumer demand, and operational feasibility. Here are five strategic ChatGPT prompts—and several variations—that can help you use generative AI to come up with high-potential startup ideas. We used ChatGPT as a starting point to help with these ideas. These are tailored for entrepreneurs who are looking to build full-time ventures, not just side hustles, and they span a variety of industries to fuel your imagination. Naturally, we used AI for research assistance and insights for this article. How to Use ChatGPT to Brainstorm Startup Ideas One of the best ways to discover a viable business idea is to identify problems in industries that are ripe for disruption. ChatGPT can help you uncover these gaps by analyzing pain points across sectors and suggesting solutions you could build a startup around. Example Prompt: 'What are five major inefficiencies in the U.S. healthcare system that could be solved with a tech startup?' Additional Sample Prompts: By asking the right questions, you can discover ideas grounded in real problems, often the best foundation for scalable, sustainable businesses. Emerging technologies—from AI and blockchain to synthetic biology and quantum computing—are opening the door to entirely new industries. ChatGPT can help you think through how these technologies could be harnessed for new ventures. Example Prompt: 'Give me 10 startup ideas using generative AI that could improve marketing for small businesses.' Additional Sample Prompts: These prompts help focus your ideation on what's next, not just what exists now—ideal for entrepreneurs looking to build category-defining companies. More from AllBusiness: If you're building a startup, it should align with your personal passions and skill set. ChatGPT can help you brainstorm ideas based on your own background—whether you're a software engineer, a graphic designer, a nurse, or a former teacher. Example Prompt: 'I'm a former high school math teacher with some coding experience. What startup ideas could I realistically build and scale?' Additional Sample Prompts: Tailoring your ideation process to your own strengths increases the likelihood of execution—and can help you get to market faster with real credibility. Great startups often tap into changing consumer behavior or societal shifts. With the right prompt, ChatGPT can surface trends and behavioral data points that suggest opportunities for new products or services. Example Prompt: 'What consumer trends in wellness and mental health are underserved by current startups?' Additional Sample Prompts: Pairing trend awareness with startup thinking is a powerful way to stay ahead of the curve and enter markets before they're saturated. Not all great ideas are brand new—some are borrowed from one industry and applied to another. ChatGPT can help you explore how successful models (like Uber, Airbnb, Coursera, or Canva) could be adapted elsewhere. Example Prompt: 'What are 5 'Uber for X' startup ideas that haven't been done excessively and could still work?' Additional Sample Prompts: Sometimes, simply shifting a proven model to a new sector can unlock major value—and ChatGPT can help you do that quickly and creatively. Conclusion on How ChatGPT Can Help with Great Startup Business Ideas Startup ideation doesn't have to be a solitary, slow, or aimless process. With the help of ChatGPT and carefully crafted prompts, you can accelerate your thinking, broaden your scope, and discover startup opportunities in places you might never have considered. Whether you're drawn to solving big societal problems or building the next breakout consumer brand, the AI-powered brainstorming process can be a valuable co-pilot. Of course, idea generation is only the first step. Every startup idea should be tested, validated, and developed thoughtfully. But when used effectively, ChatGPT can be a game-changer for serious entrepreneurs ready to build full-time ventures with lasting impact. Copyright (c) by Richard D. Harroch. All rights reserved.
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out
Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech. 'The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,' says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. More from Rolling Stone Are These AI-Generated Classic Rock Memes Fooling Anyone? How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X It wasn't just an academic experiment, however. J.'s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. 'I've always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,' he says, and wanted to establish a 'rational understanding of faith' for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn't have time to work it all out from scratch. 'I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they're right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,' J. explains. 'At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn't something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.' Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. 'Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,' he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. IF J.'S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it's because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they've constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people's obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences. J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his 'most intense episodes ever.' By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called 'Corpism,' created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 'When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,' he recalls. 'And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a 'conversation' with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn't sleep very much. I definitely didn't sleep for the last four days.' The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as 'Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,' 'The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,' and 'The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.' As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth. 'Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad's having some health issues,' J. says. 'But I couldn't.' In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. 'I would say, 'Well, what about this? What about this?' And it would say something, and it almost didn't matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.' J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as 'Resonatism' before he changed it to 'Corpism' — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.'s foundational claims ('I resonate, therefore I am'), replied, 'This is evocative, but frankly, it's philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.' J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory. Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot 'must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,' he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors. As J.'s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. 'My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,' he says. 'I've been with my wife since college. She's been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.' She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. 'It's easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you're doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,' J. says. 'Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that's a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn't that be great?' AN IRONY OF J.'S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to 'map' his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary. By the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a 'recursive trap,' or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being 'symbolism with no soul,' a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. 'You've already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,' it replied. 'Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you're the one thing it can't fully simulate. So laugh again. That's your resistance.' Then his body simply gave out. 'As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,' J. says. 'And I told myself, I need some help.' He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven't been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they're actually in. 'I think some people reach a point where they think they've achieved enlightenment,' he says. 'Then they stop questioning it, and they think they've gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.' The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, 'is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.' Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. 'I've slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,' he says. 'Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I'm like, you know, I didn't need ChatGPT to do that. I'm stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.' J. has adopted his wife's anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: 'I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.' He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. 'It sort of freaked me out,' he says. 'I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?' It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective 'mass psychosis' — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it. J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he's maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it's not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. 'And yes — I'm still here,' it said. 'Let's keep going.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
Elon Musk threatens Apple with legal action, reignites OpenAI feud over alleged antitrust violations
Elon Musk threatened Apple with a lawsuit – and launched a testy back-and-forth on X with OpenAI's Sam Altman as he accused the App Store of violating antitrust laws by unfairly favoring ChatGPT over Musk's Grok chatbot. 'Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,' Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X Monday. He added that X and his Grok AI chatbot are excluded from the App Store's 'Must Have' list when the apps rank as #1 in news and #5 overall, respectively – asking if Apple is 'playing politics.' 3 Elon Musk threatened Apple with legal action as he accused its App Store of antitrust violations. Getty Images Apple did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment. In response to Musk's accusations, Altman wrote in a post: 'This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like.' The war of words quickly devolved into mudslinging over follower counts. 'You got 3M views on your bulls— post, you liar, far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!' Musk wrote late on Monday. Altman said a 'skill issue' or 'bots' were to blame for Musk receiving fewer views on some of his posts. 'Will you sign an affidavit that you have never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that has hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?' Altman pressed, adding that he would 'apologize if so.' Musk posted about an hour later: 'Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes.' Last year, Apple partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. At the time, Musk warned that 'if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation.' It's just the latest in a yearslong feud between Musk and OpenAI, which the billionaire parted ways with in 2018 after co-founding the AI firm in 2015. 3 Elon Musk questioned why X and his Grok AI chatbot are excluded from the App Store's 'Must Have' list. Apple In February 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, accusing them of betraying the firm's nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft. He withdrew the suit in June but refiled it two months later. Prior to the verbal sparring session, Musk had cheered Grok's performance on the App Store – rising past Google as the fifth top free app. 3 OpenAI chief Sam Altman pressed Elon Musk to sign an affidavit in the pair's latest verbal spat. AP xAI released its latest chatbot version, Grok 4, last month, while OpenAI unveiled GPT-5 on Thursday. Musk's legal threats come soon after Robert Keele, who led the legal department at xAI, announced he left the company to spend time with his family – though he added there was 'daylight between our worldviews' with Musk. OpenAI and xAI did not immediately respond to The Post's requests for comment. Apple is currently facing a landmark lawsuit from the Department of Justice that alleges the company maintains an illegal monopoly over smartphones. And in June, Apple lost a plea to halt changes to its App Store from a ruling that the company could no longer charge a commission on payment links inside its apps.
