AI Impact Summit & Indian-origin IT CEOs

AT the global summit on artificial intelligence (AI) held in Paris last year, in which India participated at the Head of Government level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posed a riddle which suggested the innocent curiosity with which billions of people worldwide approach the subject of AI.

Modi's riddle at the AI Action Summit was this: If an AI application — app for short in common parlance — is commanded to draw an image of someone writing with their left hand, will the app follow that command? The PM then gave his answer. "The app will most likely draw someone writing with their right hand. Because that is what the training data is dominated by."

Slightly more than a year has passed and India is hosting the mammoth AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. Yet, as far as can be ascertained, no one has contradicted Modi. He proceeded to complain in his address to the Paris summit about the many biases which are widely prevalent in this medium, although AI is not human and therefore cannot be prejudiced. "While the positive potential of AI is absolutely amazing, there are many (inherent) biases that we need to think carefully about. That is why I am grateful…to co-chair it", ie, the Paris Summit.

It is interesting — intriguing for the uninitiated — that none of the wizards in high technology from Silicon Valley to Seoul, where the AI summit had been held nine months before the one in Paris, has solved or explained Modi's riddle. Modi is not one of those wizards. He is not a genius from the digital world. He is like me and most of you, readers of this column, who are looking askance at the pace at which AI is taking over our lives.

In one recent briefing, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri took a somewhat sceptical media by surprise when he spoke of the impact that AI is already having on everyday lives. "You are probably all holding an AI app in your hands, on your phones, or on your laptops. Artificial intelligence is bound to have and is already having a profound impact across all sectors of the economy, polity, society, and governance. And therefore, AI summits are both significant and timely."

In strategic terms, the most significant long-term gain so far from participation in AI summits is that it has enabled India to advance its one foot in the door of one of the most exclusive macro-economic and business clubs in the world — the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), of which India has been a founding member since its launch in 2020, is located at the OECD headquarters in Paris.

India became a "key partner" of the OECD in 2007. But it has not been able to advance its standing within the OECD since then, despite growing from the ninth largest economy in the world by GDP in 2010 to the fourth largest now. Indonesia and Brazil, which also became key partners in 2007, are both "candidates" for OECD membership now. The OECD is a very prescriptive organisation, steeped in the free market.

That India has lagged behind its contemporaries Indonesia and Brazil for full accession to the organisation is an indictment of lagging reforms and neglect of equality, among other factors, by governments in New Delhi and in the states. Deepening its involvement in the GPAI during the AI Impact Summit may help in advancing the goal of the OECD accession because this Paris organisation has wholeheartedly embraced AI.

At this week's New Delhi summit, India, which sought and secured the GPAI Chair in 2023, will push for expanding this partnership of 44 countries and attempt to make it India's AI lobby.

Going forward, India would be more comfortable with the World Bank's involvement in domestic AI rather than with the rich man's club, the OECD. One reason for this is that the World Bank Group is willing to work with India on ‘Small AI’ more than the global private sector technology giants. This is especially so on the issue of job crisis, which India and the Global South dread as a result of the unrestrained AI expansion.

Small AI does not need the huge infrastructure, which technology giants are advocating and building. Small AI can be run on smartphones and laptops while the conventional AI model — Big AI — needs supercomputers, more electricity, highly trained manpower and huge resources to operate.

World Bank President Ajay Banga said last month that 1.2 billion young people will be looking for jobs in emerging market countries in the next 12 to 15 years. His predictions are that only 400 million jobs are available there. Banga said only Small AI can help alleviate this big job crisis. In fact, he predicted an adverse fallout in developed countries from the bigger versions of AI. In addition to unemployment alleviation, Small AI can help in healthcare, agriculture and education in India and similarly placed countries.

Caution, therefore, needs to be exercised at the AI Impact Summit and not to be infatuated with Indian-origin information technology CEOs like Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Arvind Krishna or Shantanu Narayan. Their public relations machines will be in overdrive during the summit. But these ethnic Indian CEOs are fundamentally responsible to their shareholders and not to jobless youth in India, South Africa or Brazil, who need help from AI.

Which is why Modi emphasised at the AI Action Summit last year that "loss of jobs is AI's most feared disruption. But history has shown that work does not disappear due to technology. Its nature changes and new types of jobs are created. We need to invest in skilling and re-skilling our people for an AI-driven future." This should be the focus of India's private and public sectors after this week as a follow-up to the New Delhi conclave.

Chasing the mirage of investment in India by global technology giants is futile, even if they make big promises to grab today's headlines and sign MoUs that will be mostly forgotten. Previous AI summits in the UK and South Korea were driven by fears about AI. The Paris Summit balanced fears with opportunities. This week in New Delhi, opportunities will be the leitmotif.