Ashwini Vaishnaw, Nandan Nilekani On TIME’s List Of 100 Most Influential People In AI

Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has been featured on TIME Magazine’s 2024 list of the 100 most influential people globally in the space of artificial intelligence (AI). 

In a short biography for Vaishnaw, the magazine said that the Minister has been leading India’s efforts to become a “major player in the world of AI”.

“Under Vaishnaw’s leadership, the country hopes to become one of the top five countries for semiconductor manufacturing—a key component for modern AI systems—within the next five years. Construction has begun on several factories,” the magazine said. 

The report also underlined that Vaishnaw faces “significant challenges” in realising India’s AI ambitions as the country’s tech sector “struggles with low private R&D (research and development) investment and a lack of advanced manufacturing ecosystems”. 

It also flagged the high import tariffs on electronic components, global competition for resources, and the complexity of rapidly upgrading infrastructure as other key hurdles to India’s AI dreams. 

Titled ‘TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024’, the list also featured Infosys cofounder and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani as one of the biggest faces in the field of emerging technology. 

Nilekani grabbed a spot on the list on account of his latest project ‘Adbhut India’, a non-profit collective that aims to create public infrastructure to enable AI developers to build India-specific products. For instance, Adbhut India is developing datasets of Indic languages and India-specific benchmarks.

Another Indian on the list was actor Anil Kapoor, who grabbed the limelight for his landmark legal victory in September last year in connection with the unauthorised use of AI to create content bearing his “likeness”.

Meanwhile, multiple other Indian-origin executives of US-based tech giants also grabbed a spot on the list, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, head scientist of artificial general intelligence at Amazon Rohit Prasad, among others. 

Curiously, social media platform X and AI company xAI’s CEO Elon Musk did not feature on the list. 

The list comes at a time when India has ramped up its focus on promoting and spurring the adoption of AI through a slew of sops and policy initiatives. The Centre’s ambitious IndiaAI Mission aims to increase the country’s computing capacity, increase access to high-quality datasets and push the homegrown AI startup ecosystem with funding. 

Owing to the growing AI mania and the regulatory push, India, as per Inc42, is home to more than 100 GenAI startups that have raised more than $600 Mn between 2019 and 2023. 

As per an Inc42 analysis, India’s GenAI market is projected to see a major boom in the coming years and is expected to cross the $17 Bn mark by 2030. 

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