India seeks role in shaping AI with summit of world leaders, tech chiefs

By Saritha Rai

 

India kicks off one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence summits Monday, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking to clear a path for India in a heated race to develop frontier models.

 

World leaders, tech moguls, AI founders and investors are expected to arrive in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit, potentially the largest gathering of AI luminaries to date. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc., Sam Altman of OpenAI Inc., Dario Amodei of Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Alexandr Wang are on the guest list, alongside researchers including Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch. 

 

 

During the summit’s final two days — Feb. 19 and 20 — French President Emmanuel Macron will deliver the keynote, followed by Modi’s remarks. 

 

For Modi, the summit offers a chance to showcase India’s vast tech-savvy population and engineering talent as forces that could tilt the next phase of the global AI race in its favor. The country has digital infrastructure powered by data from over a billion citizens, identifiable through Aadhaar, a biometric ID system. It has a proven track record of scaling technology quickly despite late starts — missing the personal computer boom but becoming a software services powerhouse and leaping from limited landlines to nearly a billion smartphones in under two decades.

 

“By overlaying AI over existing digital identity, payment rails as well as health care, education and governance stacks, India is attempting to compress decades of development into years,” said Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT. “And what gets built for India won’t stay only in India.” 

 

The country is already exporting its digital identity and payments blueprint. MOSIP, an open-source platform inspired by Aadhaar’s architecture, is now helping countries including the Philippines, Morocco and Uganda build national ID systems. Some countries are creating digital payment platforms atop the same scaffolding.

 

In AI competitiveness, India ranks third globally, trailing the US and China, according to Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. 

 

Global tech firms are taking notice. OpenAI and Anthropic are setting up operations in India, courting enterprise customers, developers and government agencies. Google and Meta are expanding data centers to serve one of the fastest-growing markets for models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Nvidia Corp., squeezed by US export curbs on high-end chips in China, sees India as a counterweight, though its chief pulled out of the summit at the last hour citing “unforeseen circumstances.”

 

Still, industry analysts caution that years of underinvestment in technology research and development may hamper India’s AI growth. Aakrit Vaish, founder of AI-focused fund Activate, said the country’s real breakthrough will come from strengthening its research ecosystem so “we aren’t just a testing lab for Silicon Valley’s algorithms.”

 

Efforts to build locally attuned models are already underway. Systems reflecting India’s linguistic diversity will be unveiled this week, with researchers developing voice-first systems for dozens of Indian languages.

 

At the summit, government-backed BharatGen, formed by combining the research muscle of India’s top engineering institutions, will debut Param2, a 17-billion parameter model supporting 22 Indian languages. Sarvam AI, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, will unveil an even larger model with similar voice-first orientation. Both projects aim to introduce low-cost AI to a vast population and generate more data to help transform sectors from classrooms to clinics to crop fields.

 

For US companies, burgeoning competition from such local models may further delay profitability from AI enterprises in India, a conundrum for the ecosystem in China.

 

The focus on affordability is deliberate, and that could be game changing. “Our model is designed to accelerate adoption in critical areas across governance, education, health care and farming,” said Rishi Bal, chief executive officer of BharatGen. “In India and much of the developing world, cost is not an afterthought.”

 

Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of San Francisco-based and Peter Thiel-backed Sentient AI, said India could make up lost ground if it focuses on areas like advanced reasoning for science and robotics, since “the next wave of intelligence will use data not on the internet.”