India’s AI Impact Summit: Technology For All?

The fourth AI Impact Summit was held in New Delhi, India earlier this month with participation from governments, international organisations, global technology companies, start-ups, academia and civil society from over 80 countries. Some of the biggest names in Artificial Intelligence, like Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis were in attendance with world leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Emmanuel Macron, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. To include such a wide variety of people from the public and private sectors highlights the impact that AI is having on the world at large. 

Some of the key takeaways from the conference included new funding, usage data points and announcements of collaborations and office openings:

• India earmarked $1.1 billion for its state-backed venture capital fund. The fund will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups across the country.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the U.S. He also said Indians account for the most students using ChatGPT.

• Blackstone has picked up a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraise. Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners also invested. The company now plans to raise another $600 million in debt, and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.

• Bengaluru-based C2i, which is building a power solution for data centers, raised $15 million in a Series A round from Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.

• Anthropic said that it is opening its first office in India in the city of Bengaluru. The company said that the country is the second biggest user of Claude after the U.S.

• Anthropic is partnering with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools like Claude code to Indian enterprises. To begin, both will deploy AI tools in the telecommunications sector with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence.

• Indian AI company Sarvam teased its upcoming smart glasses under the name Sarvam Kaze. The company has released several models in the past few weeks, including a dubbing model, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model, and a vision model for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

• OpenAI said that 18- to 24-year-old users in India drive nearly 50% of the usage in India on ChatGPT.

• Indian tech company Tech Mahindra released an 8 billion parameter Hindi-oriented model for educational use cases.

• UAE’s G42 teamed up with U.S.-based chip maker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India through a supercomputer. Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project.

• On the sidelines of the India AI summit, Sam Altman said that concerns around how much water AI uses are “totally fake,” but acknowledged the issue of water usage when “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.”

There was also another significant moment where India formally joined the US-led Pax Silica Initiative, which is a cooperative coalition focused on strategic technologies, critical minerals and semiconductor manufacturing in order to create a smooth supply chain network of materials used in creating AI infrastructure. At the end of the conference, the New Delhi Declaration articulated shared commitments to safe, secure and trustworthy AI; equitable access to AI benefits; and strengthened international cooperation. It was endorsed by 91 countries and international organisations, including China, Russia and the United States, although it did not address AI used for military purposes.

Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, other nations are worried about the rapid pace of AI. India and other Global South countries are realising quickly what this will mean if they are unable to compete in this sector. Paul Fraioli from IISS wrote the following about this issue:

“The success of Anthropic’s Claude Code and other agents this year, which surprised even AI optimists, has rattled the global software sector, with significant share-price declines among companies whose offerings risk partial automation. India’s position as the world’s leading exporter of information-technology services, a sector that employs millions and underpins the country’s integration into the global knowledge economy, leaves it exposed to this disruption.”

Having the conference in India underscores the importance of having global input on how to go forward in this new technology, especially the Global South. The emphasis of the conference was to coalesce on the vision of inclusivity, digital public infrastructure, multilingualism and responsible innovation when it comes to AI and reinforces the need for every voice to be included. Technology needs to be developed alongside governance, ethics, and dialogue to ensure safety and equity, especially with an incredibly powerful tool like AI. Maybe at the next summit there will be more formal commitments to address some of the problems associated with AI, such as the impact of AI like information integrity, deepfakes, the fight against disinformation and media sustainability.