India at GPAI 2024, AIRAWAT, and More

The AI4India Weekly #30

Dec 11, 2024

This week, we spotlight India’s growing influence on the global AI stage. From India’s impactful participation at GPAI 2024 in Serbia, emphasizing grassroots innovation and initiatives like #DataDaan, to India’s cutting-edge AIRAWAT supercomputing platform, the nation is setting benchmarks in inclusive AI development. Explore insights on the rise of open-source GenAI, quantum computing breakthroughs, and a robust AI ecosystem that bridges innovation with ethics and sustainability.

India at GPAI 2024: A Vision for Inclusive and Sustainable AI

At the GPAI Summit 2024 in Belgrade, Serbia, India showcased its ambitious vision for leveraging AI as a force for inclusivity and economic transformation. Delivering India’s address, Union Minister Shri Jitin Prasada underscored the government’s commitment to developing AI solutions that are ethical, sustainable, and tailored to local needs. He emphasized India's leadership in democratizing AI access, highlighting initiatives like the Public GPU Cloud and BHASHINI for Indic-language inclusion, which exemplify the country's innovative spirit.

AI4India participated in the panel discussion titled “Empowering Emerging Markets: The Role of AI in Job Creation and Economic Growth.” This session, featuring global experts and policymakers, explored how AI can drive economic empowerment in developing nations. AI4India’s Co-Founder Shashi Shekhar Vempati, in the panel, highlighted India’s distinctive advantages, such as its lack of legacy systems and a robust ecosystem of grassroots innovation, positioning the country to lead the way in adopting AI solutions tailored to unique local challenges.

In his address, Vempati emphasized the transformative potential of AI in emerging economies like India. He articulated how initiatives like the Public GPU Cloud, a government-backed infrastructure project, are democratizing access to computational resources, enabling smaller organizations and researchers to participate in AI innovation. He drew parallels with India’s rapid adoption of mobile technologies, highlighting how similar leaps could be achieved in AI. Vempati also showcased BHASHINI, an Indic-language AI initiative breaking down linguistic barriers, enabling diverse populations to access AI-driven tools and services, fostering inclusivity across agriculture, public services, and manufacturing.

One of the key themes of Vempati’s address was the Data Daan campaign, AI4India’s flagship initiative. He explained how the campaign is tackling one of the most significant barriers in AI development—access to high-quality, diverse datasets. By creating a repository of publicly available datasets contributed by individuals, institutions, and public bodies, Data Daan empowers researchers and startups to develop AI models that are contextually relevant to India’s socio-economic landscape. He described the campaign as a blueprint for harnessing collective effort to turn challenges into opportunities, enabling India to innovate at scale and speed.

Vempati’s reflections on the summit also provided broader insights into global AI trends. He noted the increasing prominence of AI ethics and sustainability, with discussions centered on balancing AI development with environmental considerations. He highlighted the rising concerns over equitable access to compute power, the need for public datasets, and the growing divide between proponents of rapid AI advancement and advocates for caution in achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Closing his address, Vempati challenged India to go beyond following global tech giants and instead focus on building indigenous fundamental models and sustainable AI practices. Through initiatives like Data Daan and collaborative efforts with organizations like the Center of Policy Research and Governance (CPRG), AI4India is positioning itself as a leader in charting a unique AI-driven future for India.

AIRAWAT: India’s Supercomputing Power for AI

India’s AIRAWAT platform, developed by C-DAC, represents a significant leap in the country’s AI ecosystem. Designed as part of the National AI Resource Platform, AIRAWAT provides robust computational resources for AI research and development. It supports a wide range of applications, from natural language processing to advanced data analytics, catering to academia, startups, and enterprises.

By offering high-performance AI capabilities, AIRAWAT democratizes access to cutting-edge technology, fostering innovation and bridging gaps in AI adoption. With its scalable infrastructure and focus on collaboration, the platform is a cornerstone of India’s vision for a self-reliant and inclusive AI-driven future.

Learn more

The Rise of Open-Source and On-Premise GenAI: A New Era in AI Deployment

Open-source and on-premise generative AI (GenAI) systems are becoming increasingly popular as organizations seek cost efficiency, customization, and enhanced data security. Open-source models offer transparency, rapid innovation, and adaptability for specialized applications, making them attractive for industries like healthcare and finance.

Meanwhile, on-premise GenAI solutions provide consistent performance, lower long-term costs, and greater control over hardware and sensitive data. A growing number of enterprises are investing in GPU servers to leverage these benefits, highlighting a shift towards self-reliant AI infrastructures that balance innovation with compliance and security.

Read More

Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai Share Their Excitement Over Google’s Willow Chip

Google has unveiled Willow, a groundbreaking quantum chip capable of solving complex problems in under five minutes—tasks that would take classical computers 10 septillion years. Willow, equipped with 105 qubits, achieves a major breakthrough by reducing error rates as qubit counts scale, addressing a key challenge in quantum computing. Sundar Pichai lauded the milestone, suggesting futuristic applications like quantum clusters in space, an idea that sparked excitement from Elon Musk. With real-time error correction and revolutionary speed, Willow paves the way for advancements in medicine, AI, and energy optimization, heralding a new era in quantum technology.

Read More

German Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Questions Practical Impact of Google's Quantum Supremacy Claim

Sabine Hossenfelder clarifies Google's recent quantum supremacy claim, noting it involves a 100-qubit chip performing a random distribution calculation faster than a conventional supercomputer. While impressive scientifically, she highlights the calculation's lack of practical use and recalls similar claims from 2019 that were later contested by IBM and conventional computational methods. Hossenfelder emphasizes that practical quantum computing applications require around 1 million qubits, a goal far from current capabilities. She also cautions against overhyping quantum advancements, as many claims of "quantum supremacy" or "advantage" have been undermined by clever conventional computing methods.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has forecasted a slowdown in AI advancements by 2025, citing that the "low-hanging fruit is gone," making future progress more challenging. Speaking at the Dealbook Summit, Pichai dismissed the idea of an "AI performance wall" but acknowledged the need for deeper breakthroughs, particularly in reasoning and executing complex sequences. Industry insiders agree, highlighting bottlenecks in scaling models and feeding them high-quality data. Pichai remains confident in Google's leadership, taking a subtle jab at Microsoft's reliance on OpenAI models, asserting Google's dominance in proprietary AI innovation.

‘Make AI in India, work for India’ - Union Minister Jitin Prasada, speaking at the India Internet Governance Forum (IIGF) 2024, emphasized India’s goal to lead the AI revolution, developing AI for the country and the world. He highlighted India’s digital progress, focusing on inclusive growth, cybersecurity, and sustainability. The minister stressed the importance of collaboration for secure digital solutions.

IBM Report Reveals Indian Businesses Embrace Long-Term AI Investments - Indian businesses are shifting from AI experimentation to long-term investments, aiming for innovations, cost savings, and improved revenue generation, according to IBM’s APAC AI Outlook 2025 report. Enterprises plan to prioritize AI in customer experience, strategy, and IT optimization. Key challenges remain in data accessibility, AI skills, and integration. The rise of smaller, specialized AI models and responsible AI adoption are set to redefine business productivity and scalability, with many businesses expecting significant AI benefits in the next 2-5 years. Read More

Airtel's AI Spam Filter - Airtel's AI-powered spam filter has flagged 8 billion spam calls and 0.8 billion spam SMS in 2.5 months. It identifies nearly 1 million spammers daily, reducing customer responses to suspicious calls by 12%. 35% of spammers use landlines, with Delhi, Gujarat, and Mumbai being key hotspots. The filter has helped protect customers in major cities like Mumbai, Chennai, and Gujarat. Read more
NVIDIA Expands Physical AI with Isaac Sim on AWS for Scalable Robotics Development
Amazon's AI Supercomputer Plans, Microsoft's UK Antitrust Suit, and China's Trade Retaliation

#DataDaan - Donate for a Digital India

Aligned with the IndiaAI mission and the efforts from MeitY to ensure the availability of AI-usable data across govt, the #DataDaan campaign by AI4India.org is inviting participation from individuals and organizations to contribute valuable data for AI development in India. This initiative aims to gather diverse datasets to enrich the national data repository, supporting innovation across various sectors. We encourage everyone to read the detailed white paper on the campaign - https://bit.ly/DataDaan and fill out the form - http://bit.ly/3XfxD3H to contribute to this transformative effort.

We’ve also created a podcast on #DataDaan using Google’s NotebookLM, which transforms documents into engaging audio conversation. Listen to the podcast below!

This concerted push to make AI work for India highlights how data accessibility can unlock the potential for large-scale socio-economic transformation, driving innovation, and ensuring India’s competitive edge in the AI-driven global economy.

NOTE: The views expressed by the authors are their own. AI4India as a forum does not endorse any comments on specific brands, products, platforms or companies.

Join our AI4India.org forum to be a part of the AI revolution in India by visiting our site now.

THE AI4INDIA WEEKLY

Discussion about this post