GPAI Summit 2023: Need for more GPUs, AI tech talent, and regulation in India

India is the chair of Global Partnership on AI Summit, which kicked off last evening in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Prime Minister, as well as corporate leaders from India discussed the potential risks surrounding artificial intelligence and the need to form regulations to govern AI tech. The issue of lack of compute power due to GPU shortage was also discussed at the Summit.

Risks of AI

The PM noted that AI has the potential to destroy the 21st century. He batted for global consensus on AI policy, as discussed in the G20 Summit held in September.

“AI has the potential to destroy the 21st century," the PM said. “There was an understanding that arrived at during G20, that in the same vein how the world has protocols on various subjects, there should be protocols for AI too.”

“We should prepare a global framework on AI, for testing and deployment of high-risk, frontier AI tools. For that we need conviction, commitment, coordination and collaboration,” Modi added.

Need to cultivate Indian talent

The Summit also shed light on the need to cultivate tech talent from India in the age of AI. Vijay Shekar Sharma, the founder of fintech platform Paytm, noted that AI development needs to be India centric, unlike previous tech phenomena like search engines or social media.

"Unlike social networks or search engines where Western solutions have worked, it is about using citizen or historic data points (in AI). Whether through an open source large language model or by training a model with Indian data, AI will be a key to providing services to our citizens," Sharma said.

International players, like OpenAI, have also set their eye on Indian tech talent. Anna Makanju, Vice President of Global Affairs at the AI company, said that OpenAI would be planning a developer event in India next month.

She said, “I am delighted to announce we will hold a developer gathering with our VP of engineering Srinivas Narayanan in Bengaluru in January with more to follow. Our plan is to convene developers here in India alongside OpenAI product leaders to address some of the most difficult safety challenges.” 

Need for compute power

One of the most significant challenges of AI development is the bottleneck in the GPU supply chain. The PM noted that the government is working on alleviating this issue and will launch schemes to bring more compute power to India.

“We will launch an AI mission to get AI compute power which will help startups and innovators. With this mission, agriculture, healthcare and education sectors will be promoted,” he said while addressing the Summit.

Earlier this year, an expert panel recommended that the Indian government create computing infrastructure of 24,500 graphics processing units (GPU) at 17 centres to enable innovation in AI.

The GPAI Summit has representatives from 28 member countries and the European Union.