DailyPost 3048
INDIA – THE AI BYSTANDER…
Is the nation just an AI bystander, or has it been on the IT benches for decades? Some might say, this has happened with most of the technologies; the mobile revolution, internet, penetration and UPI notwithstanding. What progress have we made in hardware in the last few decades, while we have been singing paeans of our IT industry. Same goes for software, operating system, cloud and what not, while we felt that we were doing exceedingly well and proclaimed ourselves to be the emerging powerhouse of the world. We have been extremely happy being the back office of the world, and unfortunately we remain happy and satisfied with it, even after a passage of more than two decades.
Somewhere, we need to start, and to our good luck, we started our IT journey, but the irony is that today, we are not in position to say, as to how much of the journey we have traversed? Can anybody tell you where we are positioned in the world of tech today, in comparison to the US or China, and how long and what effort would it take to reach there. Transformational and exponential tech development based on research and innovation cannot be compared to building a tech park in Bangalore or elsewhere. The builder builds it and keeps getting recurring profits for decades together, while attending to maintenance and necessary upgrades.
The so-called IT / software industry developed with this mindset. There is absolutely nothing to start with call centers and managed services but our IT czars made it their permanent habitat. They were happy with whatever money they made on the sidelines and were not ready to move onto mainline IT, as that would require different sorts of effort, commitment, vision, delivery psyche, perseverance and cost. While the world moved on with PC, software, chips, products, mobility, cloud, world shattering apps, landmarks in AI et al, we remain tied to our model of IT / Software /Cloud / AI. Today, not only have the Indians IT behemoths lost, they have pushed us far behind in the tech / AI race for all times to come, going by their track record and their stoic silence.
If not DeepBlue, at least since the days of IBM Watson, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been showing promise. DeepMind, AlphaGo till AlphaFold all kept happening for much more than a decade. It did not impact our industry. The OpenAI story also started in 2015 with GPTs regularly falling out of their closet. None of it made any difference to the Indian IT leaders. They kept on basking in the carefully manicured legacy enabled glory. Instead of AI infra, chips, reinforcement learning etc, our topics of debate veered around 70 hours work week, middle class values, humility and moonlighting. We kept on praising our StartUp hub, hanging fine mostly on funding unconnected to its real value, tech worth and likely future trajectory. Even ChaptGPT could not push our IT Seths into action. There has been no comment, response or statements from our tech leaders, who know the industry in and out on the earth shattering appearance of DeepSeek, set to change the IT world and world forever.
CAN WE BOAST OF BECOMING A SUPERPOWER WITHOUT BEING IN THE AI RACE?
Sanjay Sahay