India, on Monday, kicked off one of the world's biggest artificial intelligence summits, with the country's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, seeking to create space for India in the rapidly advancing race for developing cutting-edge frontier models.
Leaders, tech industry leaders, AI creators, and enthusiastic investors will meet in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit, which promises to be the biggest meeting of AI experts to date. The meeting will include some big names, including Sundar Pichai from Alphabet Inc., Sam Altman from OpenAI, Dario Amodei from Anthropic PBC, Alexandr Wang from Meta, Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch.
Also Read | Delhi Red Fort blast: NIA reveals key names, probes alleged terror module link
During the final two days of the meeting, on February 19-20, French President Emmanuel Macron will be the keynote speaker, with Modi delivering the closing remarks.
Showcasing India's vast tech-savvy population
The summit provides Prime Minister Modi an opportunity to showcase India's enormous technology-savvy population and engineering capabilities, which can be game-changers in the current global technology competition. India operates on a digital platform enabled by data connected to more than one billion people via the Aadhaar identity programme.
India has demonstrated an ability to move quickly with technology, despite being late to the game. India bypassed the personal computer revolution to become a software powerhouse, then jumped from having limited landlines to having nearly one billion smartphone users in fewer than two decades.
"By overlaying AI over existing digital identity, payment rails as well as health care, education and governance stacks, India is attempting to compress decades of development into years," said Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT, as quoted by NDTV. "And what gets built for India won't stay only in India."
India ranks third globally in AI competitiveness
The country is already exporting its blueprint for digital identity and payments. The MOSIP, an open-source framework inspired by Aadhaar, is aiding countries like the Philippines, Morocco and Uganda in developing their own identity infrastructure.
Also Read | Manipur security forces arrest alleged KKYL member; mobile phones and SIM cards seized
On the issue of AI competitiveness, India is placed third globally, behind the US and China, according to the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI, reported NDTV.
The global tech behemoths are sitting up and taking notice of India's growing capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence. OpenAI and Anthropic are setting up shops in India, targeting enterprise, developers and government institutions. Google and Meta are expanding their data centres to feed the growing demand for models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
Even Nvidia, struggling with export restrictions of its high-end chips to China, is looking at India as a counterweight, though its CEO pulled out of the summit at the last minute due to "unforeseen circumstances".
AI ambitions face R&D reality check
Experts are warning that years of neglect in funding technology research and development (R&D) may hinder India's progress in its journey to AI supremacy. NDTV reported that according to Aakrit Vaish, founder of the AI-focused fund Activate, "the inflection point will be when we strengthen our own R&D ecosystem, so we are not just a testing ground for Silicon Valley's algorithms".
The shift towards locally adapted models is already underway, with dozens of voice-based solutions being rolled out this week, tailored to the linguistic diversity of India.
During the summit, BharatGen, a government-backed project founded on the research power of India's best engineering institutions, will launch its Param2, a 17-billion-parameter model that supports 22 Indian languages, reported NDTV. Sarvam AI, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, will also launch its own larger model with a focus on voice-based interaction.
Also Read | Delhi Metro’s Magenta Line all set to become longest corridor of India with 65 stations
Accessibility push
The motivation behind both of these new ventures is to make AI accessible to a huge number of people, thereby generating data that can revolutionise everything from the classroom to the clinic to the farm.
This new competition from within India may delay the prospects of profitability of AI ventures in the country, posing the classic conundrum faced by the United States with China.
The focus of these new ventures is clearly to make AI more affordable, an aspect that may prove to be revolutionary.
"Our model is built to speed up adoption in key areas like governance, education, health care, and farming," said Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen, reported NDTV. "In India and much of the developing world, cost isn't an afterthought."
