INDIA NEEDS TO INVEST IN AI NOW

TO MAKE AI AN INCLUSIVE TECH THAT LEVELS PLAYING FIELDS, INDIA NEEDS AN INCREASE IN DATASETS WITH REPRESENTATION OF REGIONAL LANGUAGES AND A HIGHER SUPPLY OF ACCELERATOR CHIPS

A year ago, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a deeply technical subject discussed in computer science and technology circles. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, sparking a change in the world as we know it. Suddenly, everyone from a fifth grader looking to write a poem to a CFO trying to analyse the latest financial statements was able to use AI to produce something meaningful. That is transformational, in a way that we haven’t seen since the birth of the internet search.

ChatGPT is an application that is built using an AI model called GPT, short for Generative Pretrained Transformer, which is a type of AI model called Large Language Model (LLM) and used interchangeably with Generative AI (GenAI). We can split the history of AI into three eras. 1. Pre-Deep Learning era, 2. Deep Learning era, when layers of algorithms were used to process data, imitating the human thinking process, 3. GenAI era. Although the term AI has been in use since the 1950s, the inauguration of post-Deep Learning, the latest era—the province of GenAI proper—began in 2017, with the publication of a paper, written by Google researchers, titled ‘Attention is all you need’. Even though AI did prove useful before the GenAI era, its adoption was limited because of the deep expertise needed to deploy it. GenAI has the potential to enable a large section of end-users to take advantage of AI without specialised knowledge, as seen by the rapid adoption of ChatGPT. GenAI possesses the potential to unlock the next trillion dollars of value globally, enabling global growth and universal upliftment.