AI Summit gets going in New Delhi in gung-ho spirit

India is hosting a week-long AI Summit, where heads of state and governments including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, AI corporate honchos including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai are attending the mega event.

The earlier AI summits were held in Britain, France and South Korea, but compared to the New Delhi event they were small and modest.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the summit and reiterated the summit theme of “welfare of all, happiness of all”. He said that India hosting the summit showed the success of the country’s status as a science and technology hub.

India’s railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw declared, “The goal is clear: AI should be used for shaping humanity, inclusive growth and sustainable future.” Indian political leaders and business leaders are positive about the benefits of AI, and they do not share the apprehensions expressed by leaders and people in other countries of how AI could kill off jobs and create disruptions.

Modi believes that AI would help make India a leading destination of both technology and investment, which will boost economic growth. He wants to leverage the fact that India is the most populous country – it has overtaken China’s population more than two years ago – and therefore provides the largest market for AI products.

The event is called India AI Impact Summit, and the impact is defined in terms of opening up new vistas of development for the whole world, especially the developing and poor countries. India is not the hub of AI technology development. That is dominated by the United States and China. But what many tech and AI entrepreneurs see in India is the prospect of a vast market for AI products.

AI needs huge data centres, and again India is seen as providing the physical base for the centres which need land and energy, and water for cooling the energy systems running the data centres.

Last year, Google signed an agreement with the Andhra Pradesh government in south India to build a data centre with over a $1 billion investment. India has been the base for IT services in the last 30 years and more. Now it sees itself as the hub of AI data centres. India also wants to use the technological breakthroughs of AI to strengthen its health care, education and agriculture operations, and in these sectors it remains an unrivalled market.

India has also been batting for the Global South arguing that there should be AI commons, that the AI technologies should be made available to the developing countries. India is arguing against the technological monopoly that the United States and Chia wield in the field of AI.

India is arguing for fair access to AI which would benefit the people of all countries. India may partially succeed in convincing the United States and China about the need to share AI technologies with the rest of the world because India as a vibrant developing economy promises to absorb many of the AI technologies.

There is also a grand AI Expo at the AI summit, and so the event is not confined to policy-makers and business tycoons. It also serves as a mart for many AI entrepreneurs to sell their wares, and explore fresh market openings. While American investments in AI are raised from the market, in China it is the state that remains the main investor.

India on the other hand wans to create an open market for AI through the summit. Compared to most other countries, India is perhaps the only country that embraces AI with open arms, and firmly believes that the whole of humanity will benefit from it.