Speak fluent एआई and teach the world

Not to sound too shamanic like many cheerleaders who simply believe in India's 'grand destiny', there is an inevitability about India's progression in the AI race for two reasons. One, the country's large pool of digitally trained workforce that is engaged in tuning the technology for human needs. Two, three of the 10 most-spoken languages in the world - English, Hindi and Bengali - are Indian. This makes India's ascent in AI a no-brainer for the likes of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The manufacturer of chips, on which much of the AI revolution is taking place, is facilitating a third reason for India's rise. There is a scramble among India Inc to build innovative models on Nvidia chips. Once the computing infrastructure is in place, LLMs on which AI trains should be within reach in regional Indian languages.

LLMs are AI programs that generate text in the language they are trained upon using enormous amounts of data. The ability to do this is derived by using statistics on the rules of grammar and composition in supervised, and eventually unsupervised, training. Huang's belief that India will be able to create a Hindi LLM shortly, thereby becoming a problem solver for the rest of the world, has a strong basis in fact. India has the capacity to export AI services just as it has been exporting IT services.

Since AI will be delivered in languages people speak, its regulation also needs to be culturally sensitive. Weeding out bias in AI output becomes more complicated if the data it trains upon has conflicting views on, say, an event in history. This kind of divergence would need to be narrowed through human intervention. Alongside its ascendancy in the AI race, India could offer the world an alternative approach to regulating AI. As AI becomes available in more Indian languages, rules of engagement will have to be drafted. Not just technology diffusion and export, but India also has a role to play in emerging AI diplomacy. All of this may not be too distant. Remember, LLMs are just about 10 years old.