India Needs To Prioritise Citizen-First AI Models: Nandan Nilekani

SUMMARY

Nilekani underlined the need for AI technology to address the challenges faced by India's vast population, rather than companies pushing variants of LLMs

He advocated for experimentation, openness and collaboration among startups, government, and the private sector to increase the adoption and application of AI.

Nilekani also urged that rather than a fixation on billion-dollar models, companies should work toward practical solutions that can work in India

Nandan Nilekani, cofounder and chairman of Infosys, on Wednesday, said India needs artificial intelligence (AI) applications that benefit all citizens, instead of businesses competing to develop large language models (LLMs).

Speaking at a people+AI and EkStep Foundation event in Bengaluru, Nilekani said, “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.”

People+ai is a part of the EkStep Foundation, a non-profit organisation backed by Nilekani himself.

As per a Business Standard report, Nilekani underlined the need for AI technology to address the challenges faced by India’s vast population. He advocated for experimentation, openness and collaboration among startups, government, and the private sector to increase the adoption and application of AI.

Nilekani also urged that rather than being fixated on building billion-dollar AI models, companies should work toward practical solutions that can solve the many problems in India.

These comments come a day after people+ai announced a consortium of 24 global tech companies and organisations as part of an open cloud compute (OCC) project.

OCC members comprise US-headquartered semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and cloud company Oracle. Alongside this, the consortium includes technology providers and manufacturing service firms such as Von Neumann AI, Vigyan Labs, Protean Cloud, Dell, Nasscom, Dixon Technologies, NeevCloud, Tata Communications, Tecnotree, Cloud Computing Innovation Council of India, TiE Bangalore, among others.

These partner companies will offer services for Indian customers who have a growing need for such computer power.

A network of interoperable micro data centres will be established across the country will be established as a part of the OCC Project, addressing the increasing need for such resources and enabling faster processing, lower latency, and stronger data sovereignty.