Karina Hillestad

I have met many interesting people working on AI the last few years, but no one I’ve talked to has had a journey quite like Bolor-Erdene Battsengel. She was born in a small, nomadic village in rural Mongolia. She moved to the city when she was 10 and taught herself English by watching YouTube videos. She finished high school at 14, college at 18, and earned a scholarship to Oxford. She started an NGO to teach girls to code and, at 29, was named the founding vice minister of digital for Mongolia. She helped develop E-Mongolia, a program to digitize the country’s services. She has now left government and is leading an effort to educate Mongolian students in AI through a program called AI Academy Asia. Her ultimate goal is to train one million Mongolians. Mongolia is sandwiched between China and Russia, but its market economy is heavily influenced by the West. Almost no one, for example, uses Chinese LLMs—they opt for American-made AI instead. We had a terrific conversation about her life, her plan to help Mongolia’s future, and how other countries in the Global South can benefit from AI. I hope you watch and subscribe. youtube.com/watch?v=7PxxaE8J…