In August 2023, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said India must develop sovereign capability in AI along with a computing and data infrastructure. “You need a way for the government and private companies to be able to leverage that in a way unique to India,” he said during his visit to India for the B20 Summit.
And India appears to be doing exactly that. Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, while speaking at the event, recently said India has the opportunity to develop something very sovereign and unique and in line with the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) like Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and Aadhar, in which India has found tremendous success. Now, with AI, nation wants to take the same DPI approach.
AI as Digital Public Infrastructure
The idea of Sovereign computer-based intelligence is as of now not hypothetical, getting some momentum universally. Nations like France, UAE, and Singapore are even Europe thinking about its execution.
However, Govt. has taken a very different approach to technology than the West. Technology is seen as a facilitator in country, and the goal will always be to maximize economic growth and real-world applications in agriculture, healthcare, and governance.
India’s Approach Towards Sovereign AI
Considering country’s linguistic diversity, the government could create an open-source base model with multilingual capabilities. This model could be fine-tuned and utilized by the public and private sectors for various applications.
Moreover, as per media reports, country’s sovereign AI program could be announced during the three-day Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) summit hosted by India in New Delhi.
Computing infrastructure
To meet the country’s calculation needs, the public authority is directing its concentration toward NVIDIA, the organization making the most developed Designs Handling Units (GPUs), utilized for speeding up the preparation and deduction cycles of computer-based intelligence models.
In September, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang met Narendra Modi at his official residence in New Delhi. The government is also looking to build a 25,000 GPU cluster for INR 8000-10,000 crores. The project is expected to follow a public-private partnership model and the AI compute capacity will be provided to startups as a service.