India AI Impact Summit Champions Global South AI Inclusion

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Last week, the India AI Impact Summit was hailed by political leaders and tech CEOs as a landmark event in bringing minds, technology, and talent together to enable a global common good for AI, as well as to enable democratization and inclusion for the global south in the AI story, whether related to cost of compute or making ubiquitous edge intelligence available for the masses. The event also covered “human-centric” ethical AI guided by global cooperation and governance.

For example, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres emphasized in his opening speech, “The future of AI cannot be decided by a handful of countries—or left to the whims of a few billionaires.” He said that clearly with the likes of Sam Altman in the auditorium.

President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron gave a heartfelt speech on how he thought India was really shining in making technology available for the masses, highlighting the universal digital identity infrastructure India has deployed among 1.4 billion people, and the universal payments system that brings even street vendors without bank accounts into the national economy.

Following this, on India’s potential for AI inclusion, Macron added, “The smartest AI is not the most expensive. It is the one built by the best people and for the right purpose. Models, infrastructure, talents, capital, and adoption. This is where the Indian model is truly revolutionary, providing solutions for everyone in the country. From 200 million of Indian farmers in their own dialect, to travel advice for 400 million of pilgrims, or AI diagnostics for rural clinics, all running on India’s digital public infrastructure. Open rates, near zero cost, adoption is key. And being inclusive is key.”

On-the-ground reality, plus OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry

While AI inclusion, extremely low-cost compute, and edge intelligence for the masses with hundreds of billions of dollars pledged from global tech CEOs visiting India was the message inside the auditorium, what I heard was a tale of two events for two different Indias. Despite me having to cancel my attendance at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances, I nevertheless followed the event from afar via recordings, social media, and conversations with people after the event.  

What we heard was, on the one hand, frustration over restricted access to the conference and exhibition whenever the Prime Minister attended. On the other hand, there was a flurry of productive activity on the trade show floor during the two days when he wasn’t there.

But the overarching feeling among attendees was the poor management, communication, and bureaucracy of staff for the days of the event when the PM was attending. I heard stories of people being turned away from the keynote auditorium despite being assured the day before that they could. Many ended up watching livestream from nearby cafés and conducting meetings off-site, which really goes against the grain of having an event to bring everyone together.

Some of the CEOs I spoke to told me anecdotally and mused that you could only get in to the keynote talks, specifically on Thursday, if you had direct contact with government ministers, or if you were from the Bollywood (India’s version of Hollywood) or cricket fraternity, as India thrives on these two—fame and celebrity often gets you access over merit.

And you only had to scour social media to hear all the stories of people being turned away, of no Wi-Fi access, digital payments not working in many areas, and even the Indian Union Cabinet Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw admitted the “challenges” in his official press conference.

It felt kind of ironic that on the one hand the political leaders and CEOs were talking about India championing the democratization of AI and inclusion of the global south, while excluding the masses who were trying to take part in the event on some of the days.

Also, another bit of controversy was seen at the end of the keynote speeches on Thursday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi called all the tech leaders on stage to hold hands in the air celebrating the unanimity of thought—only to see OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei apparently refusing to hold hands.

India has a real opportunity on leveraging AI

Despite the troubles we heard about at the India AI Impact Summit—similar, incidentally, to our experiences with Semicon India over the last two years—there’s an upside that people don’t talk about. This was probably best captured by Silicon Valley author, academic, and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa in an article published in India’s Hindustan Times newspaper this week, arguing that AI will provide India with the tools to build a future that leverages its core engineering talent, whether it’s in electrical, civil, mechanical, or biotech.

Wadhwa quotes V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, who said at the India AI Impact Summit that AI disruption was a blessing in disguise that would return engineers to their core skills rather than resorting to generic IT roles to fix and build code for global companies using India for cheap software engineering resources. For most of the last few decades, he said, India’s engineers have turned to IT and coding just because that’s where the money was—even if their skills were in another discipline.

He notes that as AI automates coding, testing, documentation, and maintenance, core engineers will have stronger incentives to remain in their disciplines, reskill with AI, and apply these to real world problems in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and medicine.

In my personal opinion, there’s a real opportunity for India with AI in the same way that mobile telephony changed India in the mid-1990s. In that era, India leapfrogged from standard fixed telecommunications lines to 2G mobile networks, and now the country is one of the cheapest in the world for mobile data.

In the 1990s, the promise of mobile phones for farmers was that they would be able to check weather apps or, later in history, prices to help optimize their own efforts and growth. At the India AI Impact Summit, we heard how the availability of low-cost edge intelligence, with open access, could make that much more useful, and transform almost every industry.

I recall being told on many occasions in India that any technology tested and deployed in India could easily be deployed anywhere in the world. That is a result of Indian developers being able innovate in order to solve real world problems, test on hundreds of millions of users or customers, and then refine the business model to find one that works for an extremely price-sensitive market.

As the cellular operators in India eventually realized in the early 2000s, even on margins of just cents, there was significant profitability, as companies like Reliance now benefit through its Jio operation, probably India’s largest telecom network operator. Maybe this is why all the global tech big guns were in India for the India AI Impact Summit—for the rich pickings that India potentially offers through deployment and monetization of real-world AI applications on a huge population already geared up to take advantage of whatever that might offer.

See also:

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Indian Chip Design Services Provider Mirafra Tapes Out 22-nm SoC

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