After Space, India Seeks AI Nirvana

India’s ownership of the moon’s south pole (for the moment) has created a “dil mange more” feeling that could trigger the country’s tech brains to seek new frontiers in innovation. And the Reliance patriarch Mukesh Ambani seems to have set the next target by suggesting that his group will make artificial intelligence (AI) available on population scale. 

To spur this sentiment further, OpenAI boss Sam Altman’s comment that India’s attempt to take generative AI to the next level could prove a “hopeless” exercise can spur us on. Skepticism from the company that pioneered ChatGPT should get more Indians to accept what IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said about the need for India to develop sovereign artificial intelligence. 

Why sovereign AI is the need of the hour

The IBM head honcho said sovereign AI opens new geo-specific use cases where others may not invest in. Also, India then needn’t expose indigenous use cases to the world. “That means you need computing infrastructure; you need data infrastructure and a way for the government and private sector to leverage it in a way that’s unique to India,” Krishna was quoted as saying. 

However, it is critical that the government steps in as a vote of confidence on indigenous AI development. This can be done by announcing a national AI computing center, one where pools of data could be shared for training AI models. “The people who tell you that you need $10 billion as investment are outright hallucinating,” Krishna said. 

And, it is no more about spending big dollars

And even if it required big budgets, Mukesh Ambani’s commitment at his company’s shareholder meeting should be enough to inspire confidence. India’s richest man told shareholders that Jio Platforms would lead indigenous AI development across domains with a view to make its benefits available to all citizens, businesses and the government. 

Like Arvind Krishna, the Reliance Industries scion is confident that indigenous AI can potentially be built at population scale, given the abundance of data and talent. On the one hand, the digital public infrastructure is growing at a frenetic speed that could handle the data storage demands of the world’s most populated country. 

Ambani took to history to promise an indigenous AI revolution. He recalled that seven years ago Jio had promised broadband connectivity to everyone, everywhere and delivered on it. Today, Jio promises AI to everyone, everywhere, and we shall deliver, he said while committing to 2000MW of AI-ready computing capacity across cloud and edge locations.  

India has already made a start with Indic LLM

Of course, both Krishna and Ambani aren’t the only ones who see the indigenous AI as a game changer. When Sam Altman made his famous “hopeless” remark, Tech Mahindra CEO C P Gurnani had responded with “Challenge accepted” via social media. And within two months, the company launched Project Indus, an indigenous LLP capable of handling Indic languages. 

Besides Hindi, Project Indus models aims to speak 40 different languages to begin with with Gurnani requesting speakers of these languages to contribute to the project with their vocabulary, expressions and conversations to make up for the scarcity of Indic language datasets that is a prerequisite for developing LLMs. 

In fact, even the Reliance group hasn’t been sitting idle. They acquired a 25% stake in the Silicon Valley-based Two Platforms which works on AI-led projects aimed to create interactive and immersive experiences. The company paid $15 million for the deal, in addition to undisclosed sums for developing the 2000-MW computing capacity. 

There’s also digital public infrastructure growth

So, money wouldn’t be the problem, nor would the skills as global hiring has been a reality for several years now. For hardware and digital infrastructure to get a real boost, there is a need for the Make-in-India projects to taste success, be it in the field of semiconductor manufacturers or scoping out capital investments from manufacturers of computing devices. 

As we all know, nothing succeeds like success. With the Chandrayaan-3 success, India is suddenly witnessing a slew of inquiries for future participation, including one from Japan. In fact, even Elon Musk has offered satellite services in India via his Starlink while noting that most of the top big-tech companies are now helmed by Indians. 

And if India can replicate the mega success of its unified payment gateway (UPI) with its efforts to decentralize digital commerce via ONDC, there would suddenly be a slew of opportunities lining up. Already France, Australia, Singapore, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are using UPI technology and could soon be tackling digital commerce too. 

And for all of these measures to provide better user experience and greater data utilization to fuel economic growth in India, there needs to be a catalyst. Maybe, this is where Arvind Krishna needs to make the call. For, all it may take to galvanize the movement is for IBM to bring quantum computing to India.