DailyPost 2606
AI STACK FOR INDIA
Indians have been the most proficient users of any generic digital technology or product and considerably contributed to the tech and digital growth of the world. It has been bereft of any customization worth its name for India. The Indian fraternity specialised in areas which did not impact the core IT development and remained on the fringes of the tech revolution. From operating systems to social media to the cloud, we are on a bandwagon of IT behemoths who rule the world. Even in eCommerce MNCs have made a huge surge. Having missed on the earlier industrial revolutions, are we poised for another miss? This would be suicidal for the nation as we have supposedly charted a different trajectory.
Can we think of becoming a superpower while missing the AI revolution? The results of success can be bountiful but failure would forever stop our entry to the digital elite club. The Indian component would remain missing and thus the Indian centricity does not come to the picture at all. The digital strength which has been created so far, would miss out on the true potential to succeed as game changers. Worst of it all, the results of the AI revolution would just be an appendage, a large chunk of global users, with no impact and nothing being created and catered directly for them, yet providing immense business potential and bountiful returns for Uncle Sam and others.
As we all know the world is at the cusp of a technology revolution where endless technologies are converging together under the all encompassing umbrella of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Most of the progress which China made in this field had a direct connection to their databases, and the nature of ML / AI it propelled. Same is the case of global IT behemoths. Now to harness the disruptive potential for India, it needs to be trained on Indian datasets and models. Bhavish Aggarwal has come out candidly on this issue and represented the concerns of right minded tech intelligentsia, researchers, industry and tech leadership of the nation. He has strongly argued for India having its own data stack, which should not end with just the language model.
The data stack should also have the layer of silicon and algorithms. He is prophetic that the time to build this infrastructure is now. Tacitly, he says the opportunity window is only now and missing it out would not augur well not the nation. Our own underlying AI infrastructure needs to be developed, to make AI truly useful for Indians. To tap the vast potential especially in industries like education, healthcare, agriculture, and logistics, the AI stack to be developed should cater to India’s unique socio-cultural fabric. Summing up as per Bhavish, Indian computing stack needs to be created silicon upwards. This means “ developing capabilities in silicon or chip design, and the associated cloud infrastructure and AI models.”
CAN WE EVEN THINK BEYOND CHATGPT TOWARDS BUILDING A TRULY AI NATION.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.