India aims to be the AI use-case capital of the world, says Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani, the Aadhaar architect and cofounder-cum-chairman of Infosys, said that India is not in the arms race to build Large Language Models (LLMs) and, instead, will focus on building artificial intelligence (AI) use-cases that will reach every citizen. He added that "Adbhut" India will be the AI use-case capital of the world.

"Indian path in AI is different. We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM, let people with capital, let people who want to pedal ships do all that stuff... We are here to make a difference and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people," he said.

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Nilekani was speaking at an event hosted by People+AI on May 7 in Bengaluru on 'Making an Adbhut India'. He spoke on the topic 'What can population-scale AI unlock for India'.

At this event, People+ai, an initiative of the not-for-profit EkStep Foundation, announced the launch of its Open Cloud Compute (OCC) project. OCC aims to establish an open network for compute resources, addressing the growing demand for AI infrastructure.

Nilekani added that India should not wait for the next $10-trillion model but should rather use the technology available today to solve challenges of its billion-people resources.

His words come amid the ongoing rush across the globe to launch LLMs and stay ahead of the AI curve. "Experimentation at scale by startups, by government, and private sector will help us go up in terms of adoption and application."

Nilekani took a jab at AI enthusiasts and companies that talk about AI and its extinction effect saying, "A lot of these doomsday prophets are essentially protectionists, who don't want to allow other people to build models, they want to make all the money for themselves. So that's not the way it's going to be here, we will open it up."

Pramod Verma, the chief technology officer of the Nandan Nilekani-backed EkStep Foundation, said OCC was conceived as a way to bring many micro data centres/micro computing environments/micro resource providers on a common network powered by common operability and discoverability.

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At the event, fintech company Setu unveiled Sesame, which it claims is India’s first LLM specifically designed for the banking, financial services, and insurance sector. Developed in collaboration with indigenous AI research firm Sarvam AI, it is being touted as the "ChatGPT Moment" in financial services.

Additionally, the personal health records app DRiefcase, built under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), showcased its findings of a pilot survey conducted to demonstrate how they use the Jan Ki Baat AI framework to collate qualitative feedback from patients at a government-run hospital in Kanpur. The survey focused on the ABDM Scan & Share module, which aims to reduce patient wait times at hospitals.

Another startup STAGE, presented India's first Haryanvi-dialect

based AI voice agent on their over-the-top (OTT) platform. STAGE, an entertainment platform for India's regional cultures serving the Haryanvi and Rajasthani cultures, recently turned profitable with over 1.2 million paying subscribers.

Rahul Deora, machine learning lead at Fynd launch of BharatDiffusion v2, a diffusion-based AI model designed to create images that reflect India's culture. It has been trained on a large collection of Indian photos to produce high-quality and realistic pictures.

Another highlight of the event was the launch of "JOHNAIC", a personal AI server built by Von Neumann AI. This one-time investment “cloud in a box” solution claims to slash AI costs by 85 percent. It also comes with in-built SaaS and AI tools to run SMEs and startups.

People+AI said it is the first customer of JOHNAIC and is using it for its own AI requirements while keeping its data private.