India Will Engage Startups For AI-Centric Digital Public Infrastructure: IT Minister Vaishnaw

Union minister for electronics & IT Ashwini Vaishnaw said the central government will take a digital public infrastructure (DPI)-based approach for artificial intelligence development in India, similar to that taken for healthcare, logistics and payments sectors.

“For AI, we are taking the digital public infrastructure approach and will be investing in creating a public platform. Through this everyone will have access to high quality data sets, protocols, legal frameworks and compute power,” Vaishnaw said on Wednesday (July 3) at the opening address of the “Global IndiaAI Summit 2024” in New Delhi.

The IT minister added that the government plans to invest in an AI computing infrastructure with 10,000 or more GPUs through a public-private partnership. Additionally, the government will create AI innovation centres, aiming to get high-quality datasets to further the efforts of researchers and startups operating in the space.

“Furthermore, the government will roll out an application development initiative for the development of such applications that can tackle social problems, with an emphasis on scaling these applications up.”

Vaishnaw emphasised that the government will focus on accelerating the growth of deeptech and AI financing startups in line with India’s AI mission.

The minister was joined on stage by S Krishnan, the secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Krishnan spoke about the need for India to work with global stakeholders to create the right frameworks for AI development. 

He also said that India is poised to make the most of the AI moment, thanks to the deep AI skills penetration, pointing to a Nasscom report from April 2024.  

The inaugural keynote also saw OpenAI vice president Srinivas Narayanan speak about how the tech giant sees the India opportunity and how it is working with startups in agritech, edtech and healthtech sectors.

“AI has added speed and dynamism to the already dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. Entrepreneurs understand market gaps and AI is reducing the cost of intelligence,” Krishnan said. 

He added that the IndiaAI Mission sets a great example not just in the Global South, but around the world, about what an end-to-end public investment in AI might entail. “We’re enabling developers to write code and we are helping them create completely conversational and natural interfaces to computing. And I think this is helping people be more productive and opening up opportunities for higher level problem solving.”

The two-day “Global IndiaAI Summit 2024” in New Delhi will host the likes of Dr Rohini Srivathsa, CTO of Microsoft India and South Asia, Vishal Dhupar, managing director for Asia South at NVIDIA, Sarvam AI founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar; Gaurav Aggarwal, VP of AI at Reliance Jio; Sambit Sahu, senior VP of Ola Krutrim among others from the global and Indian AI ecosystem.

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