Kiyota. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. New Zealand's fight to attract the minds shaping the future in tech could have just gotten a little bit harder. China has a new visa which targets young STEM grads and foreign tech talent. It's while a similar US visa now comes with a one hundred thousand dollars fee attached. The move has been described as boosting Beijing's fortunes in its
geopolitical rivalry with Washington. Today, on the front page, Victoria University's senior lecturer in Artificial Intelligence Dtor Andrew Lenson is with us to take a look at what makes this country attractive and what might be holding us back. So, Andrew, this new Chinese visa targets young foreign science, tech, engineering and math graduates and promises to allow entry residents and employment without a job offer. Would this be appealing to the world's greatest young minds? Would you say?
Potentially? I mean, I think it does depend a little bit on people's ambitions in life and some of their world views. But we are seeing a lot of young, bright minds who don't necessarily want to go to the US because of what is happening there, but they still want to be part of this really big sort of technology revolution, right, And so somebody like China, who probably is the second closest in terms of the opportunities in
that tech space, may be appealing to some. But as we know, there's also a lot of people who don't always agree with Chinese views or they are coach of things, and so it might attract some, but I'm not sure how impactful it will be in terms of, for example, people from New Zealand.
Yeah, I mean some say that this is a sold of changes in the US and how their visa system works. How many of these young people dream of making it to Silicon Valley. Is Silicon Valley the Hollywood for the tech world?
Yeah, so it difinitely used to be. If you think ten or fifteen years ago, right, everyone in my courses would be thinking about going to Google or or going to Facebook. And I think for a lot of people it still is that sort of holy grail. If you're really into the technical research side, you want to make these really big, large beggers models and things. But then there's also a lot of people who are looking at that and going, actually, no, that isn't really a line
of my values anymore. I don't really feel good about what's going on in the US or in the big tech companies because they see the impact on the environment on social systems politically, and so it's appearing still for some people who are certain, I guess drive, but not necessarily as wide square as it used to be.
Is a gen z more conscious about the world around them perhaps than us millennials or any other generation.
Were, I think definitely. I mean when I talk to students about AI, right, a lot of them have objections to how it's used, how these big companies have sort of forced it on us, and how it's been sort of deployed about looking at these environmental costs, these social costs, and so I think they are a lot more aware or put a lot more credibility towards those parts of the equation.
And perhaps we used to Is New Zealand doing enough to attract this similar talent here.
That's a hard question because anyone will tell you we're small, and so it's very hard for us to compete in terms of developing some of these products we're not going to make our own chat GBT, but at the same time, we could really do some cool stuff in terms of making AI trustworthy and showing the world how to do this the right way and how to do it in
a way that puts people first. And I think that is sort of the opportunity we have as one of those moral leaders, and so on that basis, I think resptively could be investing more both financially in terms of attracting talent from overseas, but also in terms of hk our own population, right, bringing up people from high school university with those skills, and investing in education so that we had the homegrown talent as well, because I think we're never going to be able to offer those salaries
that let you see, you know, the moons and dollars you see elsewhere, but we're can off sort of a lifestyle, perhaps in a way of doing things that is more aligned with views that people might hold.
Well, that's a really good point actually, because I read as well that along you know, along with this China visa opportunity, they've also done things like, for instance, home purchase subsidies, signing bonuses of up to five million yuhan or one point two million dollars. I mean, how how do we compete with that? And you're saying, well, we could. We could really cement ourselves as the morally ethically well based Silicon Valley, right, Yeah, I mean.
And that's what we've done similar things in the world before, when there was a nuclear free movement, or when we gave universal suffrage too so that woman could vote, or even some of the stuff with the christ it's called like, we've made those headlines and those impacts beyond our scale before, right, And so if we were purposeful about it, we too could say, hey, this is how we want to do
AI in New Zealand. And I think that is also not just the right thing to do, perhaps in many people's views, but also an opportunity to set ourselves apart economically as a provider of AI products and as a trust we're replaced to do AI and to get AI services from because we have if we had the things in place to enable that. And so I think really it's actually a gap in the market as well as an appealing prospect for a lot of younger people.
How do we make that happen?
Yeah? So I think quite a few things. Of course, there was that financial piece, so we would need to invest in bringing talent here. We also need to invest in education, so we had a funding of a tertiary secondary school education systems, not just AI, but the rider sector. So thinking about you know, the humanity, social sciences, because all of those topics are really important as well when we think about how to do this the right way, but also looking at how we best regulate and best
put guard rails and manage this technology. Not again not a stifle innovation, but to provide those certainties and those sort of rules in place so that people, both our own citizens as well a people overseas are trusting that we're doing things in a good way and that there are appropriate things in place. So I guess there's that financial part, there's a education part, and then also sort of a regulatory piece of work.
Personally, yeah, I've started using chat juputent, usually for research reasons, like you know, like I might be interested in a topic or a piece of history or something like that, and I want to sort of get a quick distillation of of something more for personal use. But with respect to government, I mean, we really think AI is a
massive opportunity for Ye Zealand. One of the real challenges we have is that we've not been We're all working really hard in this country, but we haven't been able to lift our standard of living over the last thirty years. And a big reason for that. One of the big contributing factors is we're not embracing enough technology innovation, and certainly AI comes into their big time, because that's ultimately
how government will get much more efficient. It's ulterately how our businesses will get more efficient as well.
When it comes to that education part, our kids today taught well a are they taught anything about AI in say high school, primary school or do they really have to leave high school, you know, really interested in STEM and then choose to do that maybe in higher education.
Yeah, So we saw the Ministry of Education did announce some work going forward to have AI as part of the curriculum, and so that's a good I'm not sure what it's going to look like exactly, but it looks like there is some progress being made there. But at least at the moment, very much is the sort of
self driven thing. Some digital technology teachers are putting it more and more into their year twelve year through ing content, but that often is driven by their own themselves, right, It's not necessarily that they have the support to do that, because that sort of thing is a lot of these teachers haven't necessarily been trained in technology. They've been trained in other areas and sort of been asked to teach
these courses because there's not anyone available. And so there's also need to upskill people at high schools to be able to deliver the education at that level. But also we see when students come to university that often they can be quite interested in it, and so we have a first year AI course that is genuine entry. Anyone can do it, and that's a really nice course because they can sort of get a taste for it, and then even if they don't end up during an AI degree,
they still have more knowledge about it. And again it's about building that broader capability so that we have these just understanding these conversations as.
Well, and I guess just realizing that there is a vast spectrum of job opportunities in the AI space. You don't just become, oh, I'm an AI engineer. Now, like there are specifics involved, right, There are different avenues that you can don't go down.
Yeah, definitely, And something we're seeing a lot more of as well is a demand not just for knowing about AI, but also knowing about some other area of science, of or of business. Right, so people who can understand AI and how to apply it in a financial sector, or understand AI and how to use it in healthcare. Often it's having those joint sets of skills because it's not as simple as just take your AI and plug it in. You need to understand the problem, the data, the ethical
and moral issues as well. And so I think, as you said, there's a lot of opportunities out there, and I really encourage students to sort of take the most they can at a university and get that broader diversity of skill sets as well.
Have you seen your class size growing?
Yeah, so our first year class is at about two hundred and fifty students this year. Yeah, it's busy. And when we first offered it two years ago it was about one hundred and thirty one hundred and forty, so it's gone quite a bit. And our AI major, which we're the first university to offer that in New Zealand, has also gone a lot bigger. We have about sixty or seventy students taking that through the whole program year by year, and so there's certainly an uptake. I think
it's one of our faster growing majors. And of course I'm excited about that. Yeah, it's good.
Well, you're in for a job for the foreseeable future, and I mean I suppose I suppose these kids know that as well, because when we look at the future job market, I think that everyone is going to have to know how at least how to use AI on a basic level, just like everyone had to use, you know, learn how to use touch phones.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think it's not just being able to use those tools, right, It's not just being able to use co pilot or chat GBT. It's also about understanding enough about how they work under the hood to know their limitations and their issues and things.
Because again, that is where we see a lot of the problems crop up, is when people misunderstand how these models work, or they try and you ask it for an answer to something that did wrong, and once you know a bit about technology, you start to know why that isn't quite effective. And so yeah, I think it's going to be a really important skill set, and even just doing one or two courses can really position you as a much more capable person going into the workforce. Yeah.
And given how the world is going and how it's progressing towards things like AI, do you think that the tech and AI sector in New Zealand is well funded at the moment?
No, of course not.
I was hoping you were going to say that.
Yeah. I mean, look, our government has kind of cut funding across all the sciences, and even though they are sort of advocating more money for AI re to sort of see what that will look like. There was an announcement of seventy million dollars, but that's kind of old funding for something else being reused over here, and so it's not the investment that I would want to see again, both in terms of supporting small medium businesses as well
as education sector and even research funding. Like as an AI researcher, I still have to compete to get funding for things as I should, but there's not this massive investment in funding to allow us to explore these issues in AI or to talk about these and understand how it impacts New Zealand.
And the importance on keeping those social sciences as well. Is not only do we need people plugging in and you know, making AI, I don't know what the terms are, but we need to understand how it affects our life and our society as well.
Yeah, and we saw that the government cut the Humanities panel from the Mardson Fund this year, and that's one of the biggest sort of blue sky what we call blue sky research funds, which is research that is sort of know, very forward looking and looking at some of these bigger issues. And they're kind of funding for that because they're more focus on this sort of economic growth model, but need a lot of myself and my colleagues who are AI people. So no, no, you can't do that.
We need the humanities now, right, And so even if you don't believe that humanity is important before, which is questionable at least with AI being in prison, you should really see that it's important to fund there and have social science research about how we use the technology and how it impacts us as a society.
Thank you so much for talking with us, Andrew.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at nzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.