Optimism for AI in India, anxiety in West, says Rishi Sunak at AI Summit

In a fireside chat with Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, Rishi Sunak described India as 'a country with huge digital ambitions and capacity'

Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday said India shows “enormous optimism and trust” towards artificial intelligence (AI), while anxiety remains the dominant public sentiment in Western countries.

 

In a fireside chat with Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Sunak said, “Across the world, we’re seeing different attitudes towards AI. In countries like India, there’s enormous optimism and trust, and in Western countries, we’re seeing that anxiety is still the dominant feeling towards AI."

 

He cautioned that bridging this gap requires targeted governance efforts. “I think closing that confidence gap is as much a policy task as it is a technical one,” he said.

 

'India a country with huge digital ambitions, capacity'

Tracing the evolution of global AI summits from the UK to Paris, South Korea, and now India, Sunak noted the strategic importance of New Delhi, describing it as “a country with huge digital ambitions and capacity".

 

He also underscored the extraordinary scale of recent AI investments, adding that this unprecedented private-sector mobilisation necessitates a new governance model. "This year, the large AI companies are going to spend 20 times more on developing this technology than the US did for the Manhattan Project," he said.

Exciting moment for technology: Meta's Wang

Meta's Wang described the present phase as historic in technological terms, terming 2026 as "an inflexion point". “I think we are sitting here right now at such an incredibly exciting moment for technology. I think we are at the beginning of a true acceleration,” he said.

 

Wang described the AI trajectory in three phases. From 2018 to 2024, he said, AI development was in “the era of pre-training", driven by a predictable exponential curve where “the more resources you put in, the more results you would get out".

 

Toward the end of 2024, a second wave emerged. “This was the era of reinforcement learning… this is when we saw the models begin to learn to reason,” he noted.

 

Now, he argued, the field is entering a new paradigm. “At the end of 2025… we’ve really begun an entirely new paradigm… the era of recursive self-improvement,” he said, explaining that models themselves are increasingly accelerating the development of subsequent AI systems.

 

“From the outside, what you see is maybe an acceleration of the overall development velocity… internally, what we see is just dramatic speed-ups,” Wang said, noting that the productivity of individual researchers has “grown dramatically” and is expected to continue accelerating.

India a positive case study: Wang

Wang highlighted India’s rising stature in the AI ecosystem, calling it "a very positive case study". "I was at a dinner with a number of Indian founders and venture capitalists last night, and the statistic was that there are more consumer AI startups in India than in the United States," he said.

 

He pointed to the country’s deep talent base and expanding entrepreneurial networks. “There really are some of these shining examples of incredible development of these ecosystems,” Wang added.