AI Impact Summit's focus is to give voice to Global South: IndiaAI CEO

India's value lies in building products on top of indigenous models developed with locally developed parameters, says Abhishek Singh

India will use the AI Impact Summit to showcase itself as an artificial intelligence (AI) service provider to companies and countries worldwide, IndiaAI Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Abhishek Singh said in an interaction with Aashish Aryan in New Delhi. While India may not have access to the same scale of GPU (graphics processing unit) farms as countries and companies with deep pockets, its value lies in building products on top of indigenous models developed using locally trained parameters, Singh said. Edited excerpts:

 

What should one expect from the February summit happening in New Delhi? 

The event will mark the first AI Impact Summit to be held in the Global South. When members met for the first time at Bletchley Park in 2023, the primary concern was safety and security, the risks posed by frontier AI models, and what governments should do to ensure AI is used more for benefit and less for harm.

 

South Korea then hosted the next summit, and France hosted the AI Action Summit in 2025. Over the past three years, the ambit has expanded, with companies and countries now thinking about innovation, the future of work, development, the democratisation of AI, social good, and the Global South.

 

What could be the driving dialogues during the AI Impact Summit? 

The primary focus of the dialogues this time will be to give voice to the Global South and ensure that AI users are also factored in when this technology is diffused and disseminated. Ensuring that everyone has access to computers, datasets, and algorithms, and that there is a marketplace for AI applications, will also drive discussions at the AI Impact Summit.

 

We will also focus on creating dialogues around developing tools for safe and trusted AI, building capacity at all levels, and establishing global networks for research collaboration and information sharing.

 

India focused on showcasing its digital public goods story during the G20 Summit. What solutions can one expect India to exhibit this time?

 

During the G20 Summit, we showcased how our digital public infrastructure (DPI) has enabled India to be seen as a country where technology solutions are built at a fraction of the cost compared to elsewhere.

 

Similarly, in AI, we are positioning ourselves as both a technology leader and a country with an abundance of tech talent. We want to showcase that.

 

How does the country position itself in the global AI race? 

This so-called race is more in the perception of everyone else. 

As far as India is concerned, we are aware of the capabilities and computer access we have. We do not have access to the GPU farms that many Western companies and countries possess. But we also know that our value lies in building products using 120-billion-parameter, voice-enabled AI services that further empower people and offer better services.

 

Our objective is to solve our own problems and challenges, which means we may not have state-of-the-art models or trillion-parameter large language models. Our models, trained on Indian datasets and local contexts, will solve Indian problems. On some benchmarks, they will perform better than global AI models.