On lines of the digital public infrastructure (DPI) like Aadhar, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), etc, the government is looking to shape global trends and conversations in artificial intelligence by developing the country’s own sovereign AI infrastructure, minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Wednesday.
“We are determined that we must have our own sovereign AI. We can take two options. One is to say, as long as there is an AI ecosystem in India whether that is driven by Google, Meta, Indian startups, and Indian companies, we should be happy about it. But we certainly don’t think that is enough,” Chandrasekhar said at FE.com’s Digifraud & Safety Summit, 2023.
He said there is an opportunity for India to also have something which is more sovereign and a lot more unique, like India DPI.
To develop large language models and datasets, there will be requirement of anonymised personal data. Since the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, places lot of restrictions on companies to process the data owing to privacy concerns, the meaningful use of datasets can be done with the government’s intervention.
“The only other way for sovereign AI is to have a government, not curated, or managed, or approved but a government-sponsored India database platform,” Chandrasekhar said, adding that the same is in progress and could be registered as a Section 8 type of non-profit company or as a public-private partnership project over time.
With sovereign AI and an AI compute infrastructure, the government is not looking to just compete with the generative AI type of model, but looking to focus on real-life use cases in healthcare, agriculture, governance, language translation, etc, to maximise economic development.
Lately, the government has also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with IBM in AI skilling, and ecosystem development, as well as building advanced foundational models in generative AI capabilities. AI computing company NVIDIA is also working with the government and Indian companies including Infosys, Reliance, and Tata to help develop sovereign AI infrastructure.
When asked about AI-specific legislation on the lines of the US and the European Union, Chandrasekhar said, that Europe’s approach is based inherently on regulation for the rights of the citizens and the US approaches this from a point of regulation for markets. “Our approach will be a hybrid of both,” he said.
On the deepfake issue, the minister said the government is approaching it as a totally zero-gap violation by the platforms. In a meeting last week with social media intermediaries and other Internet platforms, the government had told them that under rule 3 (1) (b) (v) of the IT Rules, the companies are not supposed to have misinformation on their platforms otherwise they will be at the risk of prosecution and lose safe harbour protection.
