Hon’able Minister of State Shri. Rajeev Chandrasekhar on governing AI: Innovating to be a global AI leader
Artificial Intelligence, as we know it, has sharply evolved in the last 12-18 months. Recent advancements in generative AI and the availability of sophisticated multi-billion parameter models have brought AI to real-life applications ranging from search to language translation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the Kashi Tamil Sangamam which featured real-time translation of his Hindi speech into Tamil represents how far AI has come in a short time. AI is probably the most significant invention of our times and promises to be even more disruptive and transformational than the arrival of the Internet.
I have a long-standing interest in AI and so may be excused for some of the passionate advocacy. Some 30-plus years ago (yes, that’s my vintage), my Master’s thesis was about AI and intelligent machines (robotics). Using a then-powerful multiprocessor UNIX system, I struggled to create models (collections of algorithms) programmed in Lisp with a few parameters to train a robotic arm. Those were the pre-computer vision, pre-GPU, pre-Tensor flow days and, naturally, very little came out of it except a thesis and Master’s degree. I ended up in a career as far away from AI as possible in chip design at Intel.
For decades, AI was a problem that was well known with research that waxed and waned—alternating between the optimism of a breakthrough and the despondency of dead ends, with solutions out of reach. With the advent of GPUs, AI computing power, large language models with pioneering work at companies like DeepMind, and Open AI and huge investments by Big-Tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla etc., we are officially now in the AI age. But among all the excitement over the power of AI (‘Do more with less’), there is also a growing discussion on the risks and harms. A debate is on today—how to harness the power of AI whilst ensuring the harms are mitigated?
India’s approach is clear. As PM Modi summarised in a post leading up to the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) 2023 summit in Delhi, ‘India reaffirms its commitment to harnessing technology, particularly AI, for the welfare of people, ensuring that nations of the Global South are not the last to reap its benefits.’ India is clear that rather than demonising AI, our focus is on harnessing its potential for good. Today, discussions around AI have transitioned from the abstract to tangible real-world applications that impact us all—and in a manner that ensures platforms are legally accountable for its safety and trust. Given the ubiquitous and boundary-agnostic nature of the Internet and AI, there must be a global governance framework that deals with the safety and trust of AI.
The ‘India Techade’
Under the Digital India policies, India’s digital economy and innovation ecosystem has grown into a vibrant, world-beating one with over a lakh start-ups and 108-plus unicorns created in the last few years alone. Our digital economy is expected to account for 20 per cent of the GDP by 2026, up from the 2014 numbers of 4.5 per cent and current levels of 11 per cent. AI is going to be a kinetic enabler of this. The government is designing a comprehensive mission, ‘India-AI’, which will play the role of a catalyst to ensure our goals of making the next decade full of technology opportunities—a period the PM refers to as the ‘India Techade’.
