Invest in AI with care: India's summit controversies raise hard questions

The AI Impact Summit was intended to be a showcase for a rising India. The nation would demonstrate its organisational prowess and the range of its contributions to the buzzword industry of the moment. It turned out to be a clarifying event for the wrong reasons.

 

Multitudes of delegates and visitors complained that mobiles were not allowed at the venue. They were unhappy about the disruption of normal business with halls shut due to movements of “very important persons” (VIPs). They did not relish having to walk several kilometres before they could access transport.

 

The bans on cars and mobiles may have been for security reasons. Cars can explode, and mobiles can be used to trigger explosions. The bans on people entering halls where VIPs were floating around were presumably also for security reasons.

 

But all this is very Third World and leaves one wondering whether India has the organisational skills required to host such an event. It’s even more puzzling since this is not the first mega-event India is hosting. Arranging buses and shuttles to shunt people in and out of Bharat Mandapam should not have been an impossible task.

 

Security can also be arranged without causing this level of inconvenience. The summit follows on the heels of the AI Action Summit in Paris last year. That went off without incident. People easily accessed the venue while carrying mobiles.

 

But of course, the juiciest gossip of the AI Impact Summit revolved around Galgotias University’s presentation of a Chinese robodog, which costs less than $3,000, as its own AI-driven creation, which was supposedly developed on a $39 million budget for research and development (R&D).

 

The crudity of the fraud is one of the surprising things about it. There was no attempt to change the look and feel of the robot, even though the exhibitors must have hoped for saturation coverage. Bollywood and Mollywood have many designers who spend their time dreaming up and creating science fictional swag that looks really good onscreen. The exhibitors could have spent a small fraction of the $39 million to hire a Bollywood designer to give the robot a makeover.

 

The fraud itself is par for the course. Some Indians have a history of taking information technology-related stuff from corners of the internet and dressing them up as original products. Circa 2023 for example, an IIT Madras-backed firm put out an operating system labelled BharOS where Bhar is a diminutive of Bharat. After the “new indigenous system” was announced with fanfare, it turned out to be a rebranded version of an Android Open Source Project which was freely available.

 

While being especially blatant, the incident of the robodog ties in with the history of gold rushes and technological breakthroughs. Where there’s a sniff of money, there will be scamsters. Every gold rush has had its share of people selling fools’ gold – chunks of inexpensive iron pyrites that glint like the precious metal.

 

The discovery of electricity and magnetism led to the proliferation of many perpetual motion machines. As a young patent clerk, Albert Einstein is said to have made himself unpopular by refusing to grant patents for such machines. And speaking of patents, when patent medicines became popular, “medicine men” started hawking snake oil as a panacea for all ills. An Indian variation Sande ki Tel has long been touted as the granddaddy of Viagra.  

 

At some stage, people may ask pertinent questions about that $39 million robodog. Was $39 million actually invested in “developing” this cyberanimal, or was it just a figure plucked out of thin air because it sounded impressive? If indeed that money was raised and spent, investors might want to know where it went.

 

In broader terms, a high-profile incident of this nature, emanating from a supposedly top-class private university, severely dents confidence in the quality of R&D as regards artificial intelligence (AI) in India.

 

India’s policymakers are pushing hard to create an ecosystem conducive to AI R&D, backed with compute power and state-of-the-art data centres, and attempts to integrate backwards into chip design and production. Enormous sums have been invested in this. The emergence of Canis Galgotias makes one wonder how that money is being deployed.