As China and the United States compete to control artificial intelligence, India made an effort this week to show that there are alternative ways to deal with the silicon boom.
Touted as the first high-level AI conference to take place in the Global South, the India AI Impact Summit has expanded the AI discourse to include nations in Latin America, Africa, and beyond, giving the most populous nation in the world a platform to position itself as a major player in the global AI arena.
According to Jakob Mökander, director of science and technology policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “I think that India is currently the player that most confidently says, ‘We reject this dynamic,'” and “long term, it’s good for the world that AI is not just viewed as a race between the U.S. and China.”
As implied by the event’s “impact” name, the summit focused on how nations may embrace and modify more potent AI systems to suit their particular requirements and sectors.
“Every country will want to chart their own AI destiny,” said Michael Kratsios, who led the U.S. delegation at the meeting and is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Each of them has distinctive cultural, linguistic, and traditional traits, as well as preferences for using AI.
During the event, Kratsios unveiled a number of plans to boost US involvement in AI around the world, such as a Peace Corps program with an AI focus and new World Bank funding for nations looking to purchase AI systems.
There were some snags at the start of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s five-day summit in New Delhi. The summit, which had over 250,000 registered guests, was beset early this week by complaints of crowding, long lines, visa problems, and traffic jams. There were also some significant no-shows, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang canceling at the last minute.
Hours before his keynote speech on Thursday, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has been under fire for his connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, also withdrew, stating in a statement that he wished “to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities.”
During a supposed display of unity with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other tech executives later in the day, U.S. rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic shook hands with the persons on either side of them but not with one another.
An Indian institution was allegedly ordered to leave the summit earlier this week after a staff member misidentified a robotic dog created by the Chinese business Unitree as one that the university had created.
In a post on X, the opposition Congress party claimed that the Modi government had “made a laughing stock of India globally, with regard to AI.” The statement also mentioned that India’s information technology minister had posted the inaccurate news before removing it.
In contrast to the more than $630 billion that U.S. tech companies are anticipated to spend this year, two of India’s largest conglomerates, Reliance and Adani, announced a combined $210 billion in investment in local AI and data infrastructure. While Anthropic announced a relationship with Infosys and established an office in its home city of Bangalore, OpenAI inked a deal with the Mumbai-based Tata Group.
In a speech on Thursday, Modi stated, “The solutions offered here — in agriculture, security, aid for people with disabilities, and meeting the needs of multilingual populations — are potent examples of Made in India strength and India’s innovative capabilities.”
Attendees noticed that, while this year’s conference was open to considerably more people than prior ones, there were fewer prominent government and industry executives who decide policy. At least 20 leaders of state and government attended the meeting, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as technology executives such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft President Brad Smith.
China and the United States, the two biggest AI powers in the world, did not send heads of state. The summit took place over the Lunar New Year, the largest holiday in China, which has a tense but improving relationship with India.
In line with Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments at the Paris meeting last year, White House spokesperson Kratsios, the top American official attending the event, underlined the necessity for nations to forgo stringent technocratic control over AI.”AI governance must be local, focusing on the specific needs and interests of specific individuals,” Kratsios stated in a lecture on Friday. “AI adoption cannot lead to a brighter future if it is subject to bureaucracies and centralized control.”
Kratsios introduced the National Champions Initiative, which intends to assist partner countries’ AI-related businesses in forging stronger ties with American AI initiatives. “When we say that we’re trying to export the American AI stack, it doesn’t mean that it’s 100% American content and nothing else is in there,” Kratsios told. Great national AI champions who are proficient in particular AI stack layers can be found in a large number of nations worldwide.”
China has long courted international partners in AI, and the Trump administration is keen to outcompete them. India officially joined Pax Silica on Friday. Pax Silica is an international coalition lead by the United States that was established in December with the goal of creating a robust supply chain for vital minerals.
Countries like India are concerned about becoming caught in the middle of the U.S.-China competition. Senior White House AI policy adviser Sriram Krishnan faced criticism this week for saying that the American AI stack should serve as the “bedrock” upon which its allies are built.
In order to prevent becoming overly reliant on the United States, critics suggested that India develop its own fundamental AI models. Despite the fact that China and the United States together account for around 85% of the world’s AI computing power, India’s digital public infrastructure, including digital ID, digital payments, and internet connectivity, is “better than most of the developed world,” according to Mökander of the Tony Blair Institute.
He claimed that they were pretty proud of the fact that it was a sort of middle ground between China’s open-source AI and the United States’ closed-source AI.
Since the inaugural global AI summit series, which was attended by a small number of industry and government leaders in 2023 at Bletchley Park, England, the series has undergone tremendous change. According to Amlan Mohanty, a fellow at Carnegie India and government consultant on AI policy issues, this year’s summit “takes a very expansive view of what safety means,” whereas the first summit was primarily concerned with the existential threats of frontier AI.
He stated, “Malicious use, cybersecurity risks, and national security risks are no longer the only issues.” It concerns “how to make sure that we have enough data on jobs, economic transformation, and the impact on labor transitions to be able to make useful policy changes…”
According to Mohanty, the summit’s two optional commitments—one on enhancing AI models’ performance in various linguistic and cultural contexts and the other on using data to evaluate the economic impact of AI—reflected this way of thinking.
According to Iqbal Dhaliwal, worldwide executive director of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, “it is crucial to understand what works, what doesn’t, and who benefits so AI applications can be designed to maximize social benefits and mitigate unintended harms.”
In an email, Dhaliwal stated, “The Global South is home to the majority of the world’s population,” pointing out that India is home to one-sixth of the world’s population. “By holding the Summit here, the discussion has been able to focus on the problems and applications that will impact these billions of people.”
