India's AI Potential: Opportunities and Challenges in Development and Adoption

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal sees massive potential for AI development in India, warns 'won't happen unless...'

As India has largest amount of data and largest IT services industry in the world, the country can do to artificial intelligence (AI) what China did to manufacturing, said Ola founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Bhavish Aggarwal on Sunday. In a post on social media platform X (formerly twitter), Bhavish Aggarwal said: "India has: Largest # of developers in the world. Largest # of silicon designers in the world. Largest amount of data in the world. Largest IT services industry in the world. India can do to AI what China did to manufacturing." It "Won't automatically happen unless we make it happen!" he added. Earlier also, the Ola founder had called for India to become a global hub for AI-related jobs leveraging its vast pool of IT professionals. "In India, there are tens of millions of IT services professionals and young people. Today, they are doing some work for global clients. Their work can be 10x more productive. That means not to get jobs that will be one tenth. That means we can bring 10x more jobs to India," Bhavish Aggarwal had told news agency ANI in an interview on July 7. "So we have to, we can only do that if we embrace AI. If we become the leaders of embracing AI and because of that, our economy becomes more productive faster and we create the future AI jobs in India for the whole world," he had said. On AI's impact on the job market, Aggarwal had also said: "To quantify is difficult, but I would say AI will create new jobs, AI will take away jobs also." The productivity boost due to AI is expected to lead to job displacement in certain areas, but would also create new opportunities in others, and in the near term the biggest impact of AI will be on white-collar jobs rather than blue-collar roles, he added. Bhavish Aggarwal had also lashed out against "wokeism". "They've (big-tech companies) become their own sovereigns. Their mindset is that we are setting the rules of the world. All these big tech companies, and I don't mind saying the names, Microsoft, Google, any of these, Meta, you know, they are setting the rules of the world in their own mind," the Ola CEO had said. "So, what happened in this case, I'm a user of LinkedIn. I publish my thoughts on LinkedIn frequently and engage with people. I saw that LinkedIn Pay has made that if you don't enter your pronouns, it'll refer to you as "they". And I don't know when they moved from gender to pronouns. Whereas I'm a man. I mean, I want to be referred to myself as a "he", but I don't want to set my pronouns because they're forcing me to engage with this political philosophy of wokeism by making it sort of mandatory." Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world 🌏 Click here to know more. 3.6 Crore Indians visited in a single day choosing us as India's undisputed platform for General Election Results. Explore the latest updates here!

'India's UPI Moment in AI Will Be Driven by Usage, Not Production'

Former chief architect of Aadhaar Pramod Varma believes that India's future is voice-based AI. Last year, AIM probed when India's 'UPI Moment' in AI would arrive, pointing towards the potential for a locally contextualised AI model as a digital public good. Little did the world know that the work had already started and that it was arriving sooner than expected. "We will see a UPI moment in India for generative AI through the usage of AI, more than the production of AI," said Pramod Varma, expressing uncertainty over whether another OpenAI will emerge from India but but wished AI companies in India (the likes of Krutrim AI, Sarvam AI, and SML) well on their effort in building advanced foundational models. Varma is the former chief architect of Aadhaar & India Stack and the founding architect of the Beckn Protocol. He is currently serving as the chief technology officer at EkStep Foundation and building digital public infrastructure (DPI) for generative AI in India through People+AI's initiative of Open Cloud Compute. A few days ago, OpenAI vice president Srinivas Narayanan expressed his excitement about potential collaborations and praised the diversity in AI applications being built in Bengaluru. "It is inspiring to see the ambition in their thinking and the diversity in the applications," he said. In an exclusive interview with AIM, Varma showed a similar excitement. He believed that India's 'UPI moment' in AI would arrive quicker if we maximised the utility of existing models to address challenges instead of building foundational models like GPT-4 from scratch. "I have a feeling that we will see generative AI penetrating through art, media, the movie industry, transport, commerce -- everywhere," said Varma, adding that he sees no reason for it not to happen because we currently live in a very low-performing equilibrium. A recent report showed that only 22% of Indians are leveraging generative AI for work purposes in healthcare and research, while 76% plan to use it in the next two to five years. "I can only say there is no human being who is not working on generative AI," said CP Gurnani, the former Tech Mahindra chief, at AIM's MachineCon GCC Summit recently. "The Indian path in AI is different. We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM. Let people with capital, let people who want to pedal ships do all that stuff... We are here to make a difference and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people," said Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys. On the contrary, Ola Krutrim chief Bhavish Aggarwal holds a different opinion. He recently said that India has the largest number of developers, silicon designers, data, and IT services in the world. "India can do to AI what China did to manufacturing," he added, saying that it won't automatically happen unless we make it happen. In a recent interview, Nilekani discussed how India has benefited immensely from DPI, Aadhaar, and UPI and how AI could lead to similar transformative changes. He explained that applying AI at a population scale could have an even greater impact. "We call this DPI to the power of AI," Nilekani added, emphasising that AI can elevate DPI to the next level. Varma explained that AI is already integrated into GST and Aadhaar. "AI is used extensively within GST to detect circular loops, fraudulent patterns, and process invoices," he said, highlighting its widespread application. "You can now introduce voice interfaces. If you can do voice-based payment, UPI will go through the roof. We will see AI play into DPI to further expand and bring efficiency and expansion of DPI," he continued. Nilekani believes that India's future is voice-based AI. "Indian entrepreneurs should really look at voice as a completely new human-computer interaction method. It could be very powerful, and I think it's gonna happen because voice is natural to humans." In a previous interaction with AIM, Sarvam AI said that it is currently working on a voice-based Indic LLM and plans to release it this year. Meanwhile, the IISc's ARTPARK (Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Technology Park) is preparing to open-source 16,000 hours of spontaneous speech data from 80 districts as part of Project Vaani, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's flagship AI initiative, BHASHINI. In India, approximately 10 AI startups are currently engaged in developing LLMs from the ground up. Recently, Gurnani unveiled Project Indus, a ChatGPT-like product developed for less than $5 million. Despite initiatives like Krutrim AI and Hanooman, these chatbots have yet to achieve the sophistication of GPT-4o or Claude 3.5. According to Similarweb, Krutrim saw a decline in user numbers from 498.7K visits in April 2024 to 309.2K visits in June 2024. In contrast, SML's Hanooman had only 80K visits in June 2024, but the company aims for Hanooman to reach 200 million users within its first year of launch. "I feel it's unfair to tell them that it's not working. It takes time. Every business goes through the cycle of production, distribution, and unlocking value for their customers," said Varma. Citing healthcare, Varma said that hundreds of enterprises won't rely solely on one advanced model such as OpenAI's GPT-4 or Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and said: "Both specialised and generic models will coexist and that one is not a replacement for the other." "It's the wrong dream to believe we only need one API. We will need both mega models aiming for AGI and specialised micro models that can integrate into today's workflows. "These models will bring enormous efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings to various sectors -- from industrial to healthcare," he said, giving the example of a specialised model that understands Indian laws and can draft contracts in Indian languages. AWS' chief medical officer Rowland Illing also told AIM how AWS is looking to democratise access to foundational models, saying, AWS wants to achieve that with partnerships like Anthropic, offering early releases of models such as Claude 3.5 through Bedrock, providing users with a wide selection of models and tools for secure and efficient generative AI applications.