Infra, talent, startups: Why tech leaders are betting on AI's India future

They country that exports software services must now do same in the new technology, they say

Artificial intelligence (AI) is in the headlines in India as three leaders in the technology visit the country: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Yann LeCun, and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft (who will be here early next month).

 

Huang, the chipmaker’s chief executive officer (CEO), and LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, have separately spoken about India's potential in being a leader in the technology.

 

“India should be at the centre of AI,” said Huang at the Nvidia AI Summit in Mumbai last week. India’s information technology (IT) industry, renowned for its size and expertise, is capable of moving beyond software outsourcing and becoming an AI innovation hub. “No one manufactures intelligence at the moment. Before every other country jumps into that, India should jump into that,” he said.

 

The time has come for India to export “intelligence” and not just labour. “You should not export data to import intelligence,” he said.

 

'Pivotal role'

 

LeCun stressed on India’s expertise in product development. “With its rich talent pool and vibrant tech ecosystem, India is already making significant strides,” said LeCun at Meta's Build with AI Summit in Bengaluru. “As AI continues to evolve, India is poised to play a pivotal role in driving innovation on a global scale.” 

 

Meta in July announced Llama 3.1, the largest open-source AI model. Llama 3.1, the firm says, beats GPT-4o and Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet on various parameters. It allows Indian developers, one of the largest in the world, to create AI applications.

 

The answer to why every other company is coming to India and talking about AI could be found at the Nvidia Summit, where more than 5,000 developers had registered. The event coincided with MumbaiHacks, the world’s largest genAI hackathon that brought together some 1,500 developers to write code and innovate. The event was co-hosted by Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai and Made in Mumbai in collaboration with Meta, Quantiphi and ATLAS SkillTech University.

 

“India is the obvious market. One, it has one of the largest populations. So solving any problem here gives the solution scale and it can be taken to the world. Two, from a regulatory point, India is still fairly open and collaborative. Europe is already closed due to regulations and in the US (United States) there is a saturation point. China is closed to all these companies,” said a startup founder, who attended the Nvidia Summit.

 

The leader of another Indian startup, which has raised funds and is creating a regional large language model, said: “How many LLMs will a global player make? Someone has to create the applications. While we have created an LLM, we are also working with other startups and the government in creating applications too.” (LLM is a type of AI model that has been trained through deep learning algorithms to recognise, generate, translate, and/or summarize vast quantities of written human language and textual data.) 

 

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Huang, who had a fireside chat at the Nvidia Summit, agreed that India would play a key role in the development of AI.

 

Huang said that India has all the fundamental ingredients: Data and infrastructure. “This is an extraordinary time for the world and this is an extraordinary opportunity for India. You have precisely the condition…large population, large base of computer scientists. At a time when this computer industry is going to be the intelligence industry…create your AI flywheel.”

 

India’s advantage

 

“Imagine an application that allows any person in the country to just click a picture and the in-built AI application in the smartphone allows them to take a picture of a blemish on the skin and a radiologist can see if it is some kind of skin cancer. This is an application that will likely be adopted in India first before any other country,” he said.

 

KissanAI, a multilingual AI agriculture assistant, has launched Dhenu Llama 3 for Indian farmers. Built on Meta’s Llama 3 8B architecture, the assistant is integrated with WhatsApp and gives advice on agricultural tasks when given voice and text inputs.

 

Meta recently partnered with the Andhra Pradesh government to improve public service delivery by using the company’s WhatsApp Business Solution. Separately, in partnership with the Telangana government, Llama models are being used to enhance public service delivery.

 

At Microsoft, Mustafa’s work is to advance AI research and develop products like Copilot, an AI companion for everyone. Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said early this year that the AI engineering talent in India is second only to the US. Nadella, who was visiting the country then, called India one of the most important markets for his company.

 

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys, believes that India should not get into creating another LLM. “Let these big boys (technology giants) spend $50 billion each. We would use all that to create new things,” said Nilekani, at the Meta Summit. “We would focus on how we create appropriate data and make India the use-case capital of AI for the world.”

 

Nilekani spoke about using AI for an inclusive society. “If a farmer in Odisha can speak in Odia through a WhatsApp bot and get the best knowledge in the world that is inclusive. And if we can do that on scale, that changes inclusion dramatically.”