India To Focus On Providing Affordable Compute Capacity To All: Official

New Delhi : India is focusing on a model where the government, philanthropists and the private sector can collaborate to ensure that affordable computing capacities are accessible to all, Statistics Secretary Saurabh Garg said on Friday. Speaking at a session 'Building Public Interest AI: Catalytic Funding for Equitable Access to Compute Resources' at AI Impact Summit, Garg said, "The focus is not on rationing but on intelligent prioritising (of compute capacity access). I think that is going to be the focus that impute capacity is enabling platform".

He said philanthropic organisations will have a large role to play, as their focus is on ensuring AI benefits for all.

"So, with that focus in view, the government, philanthropic organisations and the private sector can collaborate to ensure that affordable computing capacities are accessible to all. I think that's the models that we are looking at and that will ensure experimentation going forward," he stated.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will definitely transform the world, and the question is whether that transformation will be equitable, inclusive and aligned with public interest.

"And I think that's really the issue, which concerns a lot of people. The AI Summit itself was built around guiding Sutras, the people, planet and Progress. And therefore, the concept being that AI ultimately must serve human welfare, development and enable shared prosperity," he said.

Referring to the Working Group's discussions, Garg noted that from these discussions, there were six foundational pillars that we need to form the backbone of the collective roadmap for the future.

"Compute, no doubt, is today's defining barrier. The access to GPU accelerators...is a major issue for all AI ecosystems. But the issue is how it can be made distributable, affordable and global across and not concentrated in a few geographies," he said.

He also stated that we are focusing on innovation and how that part can be a public interest infrastructure.

However, infrastructure alone would not be sufficient, he added.

He noted that the skill gap is widening.

"So, how can we consider capability diffusion, focusing on joint research, shared standards, open platforms, and mutual learning? What needs to be done for this responsible deployment is so that we can link innovators to computer resources and citizens to trustworthy AI-enabled services," he said.

Equally important is the governance, where its framework needs to be robust enough to build trust, yet flexible enough to adapt to diverse social and cultural contexts.

Open source, and possibly a modular AI tax, would help enable localisation without creating dependencies, he pointed out.

In another separate session at the summit, Alexandria Walden from Google said, "I think it's important for companies to have a programmatic approach to stakeholder engagement, so we need to have ways in which we're regularly engaging with stakeholders in general, not just on a specific product question".

She also stressed the need to consult specifically on a product to have a sort of process and way to do that.