India has signalled its ambition to join the AI top table as it showcased homegrown models at the AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi last week. The event followed similar events held at Bletchley Park in the UK, Seoul and Paris and was billed as the largest yet. Hundreds of thousands of people attended, including world leaders and tech CEOs.
Ahead of the event, the UK government described India as a natural tech partner, highlighting tech companies from the country including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, which are already expanding in the UK. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said: "This Summit is an important moment in determining how we can work together with our international partners to unlock the full benefits and potential of AI, while baking in robust and fair safety standards that protect us all."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted a number of new AI models released by Indian companies. One start-up creating a definite buzz was Sarvam AI. The company released two large language models last week that it said were trained entirely from scratch in India. The models were optimised to work across 22 languages across the subcontinent, which has a huge linguistic diversity.
Gnani.ai also introduced its Vachana speech models, which generate realistic voices in Indian languages. The models can also process vocal interactions and allow users to interact conversationally. Given that India has a huge call centre industry, the subject of mitigating potential job losses was a hot topic at the summit.
Indian 'DeepSeek moment' not on the immediate horizon
Despite India’s progress, many commentators believe that a ‘DeepSeek moment’ – echoing China’s market-shaking unveiling of its low-cost rival to LLM giants like ChatGPT – is not on the immediate horizon. Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia research at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, said that a more realistic vision was to see India become the world’s biggest market for AI adoption.
However, Joanna Shields, a former Facebook and Google executive and ex-UK minister for internet safety, argued that major AI models from the global south would enrich everyone. She said: "If we have a world where we are accepting models from just the global north, we will lose so much of our cultural diversity, our uniqueness as people, wherever we come from....We don't want to develop a monoculture based on a handful of models that everybody uses around the world and we lose that richness of who we are, what makes us human."
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