The cold wars for global AI pie aside, what did India gain from the summit? And with India set to host the next summit, what are the expectations?
Global interest in Indian AI initiatives springs from two premises — one, the large AI talent pool India supposedly possesses. Second, the large AI investment opportunity in India’s fast-expanding economy opens up global capital, especially when political barriers are rising for similar investment options in the larger Chinese market.
Labour crunch is a big hurdle
But the fact that India itself is facing an AI labour crunch and requires a new AI-skilled labour force of at least 2 million did not figure prominently at the summit.
Secondly, such summits are usually known for a spate of MoUs proclaiming proposed investments in India, which would not materialise in reality. Mercifully, no such “MoU industrialisation” was witnessed at the AI Summit. Ironically, no major investment decision by global majors was also announced either. From Paris, Modi left for Washington empty-handed, so to say.
India has to take open-source bus
Back home, the Paris AI summit seems to have generated some additional momentum, or rather push, for India’s AI initiatives. It remains to be seen how the Modi government makes the most of this new AI impulse.
Professor US Tiwari from IIIT, Allahabad, told The Federal, “AI summit in France is an effort to face the challenges Generative AI companies (OpenAI and others) pose to India and other emerging markets and Europe. China had the best response by giving an open-source cost-effective solution. European Union industry, although they are against favouring these American corporates, will not support the Open Source philosophy. India has to advocate for open-source solutions, but Indian software industry is dependent on US markets. In the long run, the challenge is providing the huge computing resources required to execute various GenAI and large language models. China is providing public resources. In India, the government support is miniscule.”
In this context, Vaibhav Maini, a techie in Prayagraj, told The Federal that, “AI is being used in India in advertising, designing and even crowd management. The wide use of AI for crowd control at Kumbh Mela could have been highlighted to set an example. But it badly misfired.” [Referring to the stampede and crawling traffic jams]
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Maini also added that the nature of AI is such that ''Indian brains settled outside India can also now contribute to AI development back home''. The government, he says, should open up institutional avenues for that.
Five proposals to promote AI
Professor M Murugan, Vellore Institute of Technology, has five proposals to promote AI in India.
1. Two primary concerns of AI include responsible use and transparency. Control of big corporations over research and resources (Google, Microsoft, and concentration in tech capital as seen in Elon Musk’s offer to buy Open AI) and the dominance of big countries (America and China) underscore these twin concerns.
2. Without strong spending on research and data centres (servers), India risks being reduced to playing second fiddle and as a country providing raw data for AI training. We are at risk of missing ownership of large models, AI engines, and generators and being reduced to the role of provider of raw data for AI training.
3. India must allocate more significant resources for public research on AI. Innovations, efforts, and initiatives by small entrepreneurs are good, but over time, they are vulnerable to takeovers by major players, as is happening in the Indian software industry now. Hence, the need for public funding, public research and the prevalence of distributed knowledge in this emerging area.
4. While we are so proud of being Digital India, is it not time we invest in creating a massive public infrastructure in AI? In 1950s and 1960s, creation of huge public infrastructure in terms of heavy industry by Nehru-Indira helped us in a big way in facing the onslaught of West-led globalisation later. It is time we created a similar public-funded AI infra entity that will focus on creating AI products.
5. The role of massive servers and digital infrastructure with very high energy consumption is another crucial component for AI research, and public spending in this sector is also crucial.
