In a recent press release from PTI on 3rd April 2023, eminent personalities such as former Niti Ayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar and Zoho Corporation CEO Sridhar Vembu warned of potentially catastrophic impact of powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) on humanity and called for a debate on its utilisation to meet national goals. An open letter by Kumar, Vembu and iSPIRT Foundation Co-Founder Sharad Sharma acknowledges the need for artificial intelligence (AI) for a developing country like India but also raised concern over millions of jobs that the technology will put at risk.
“It is now evident that the emergence of powerful AI, with all its transformational potential, could also be the harbinger of chaotic – and potentially catastrophic – consequences for humanity. Finding an answer to this existential question is a categorical imperative for all nations including India,” the letter said.
Responding to this letter and also the concerns being raised globally, the Telecom Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said in parliament that they are not planning to regulate the growth or set any laws for AI in the country.
The minister recently told parliament in a written submission, “The government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country”. Vaishnaw acknowledged that there are ethical concerns and risks around AI and the government has already started making efforts to standardize responsible AI and even promote the adoption of the best practices.
Further, the Telecom Minister said that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity), along with CDAC is currently working on a proof-of-concept project on AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform) that will provide a common computing platform for AI research and knowledge assimilation. Additionally, he announced that this AI computing infrastructure will be used across technology innovation hubs, research labs, scientific communities, and industry and startup institutions with National Knowledge Network.
He stated, “The PoC for AIRAWAT is developed with 200 petaflops Mix Precision AI Machine, which will be scalable to a peak compute of One AI Exaflop.” He added that National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up a Centre of Excellence in AI, that will offer AI as a service through on Meghraj cloud with 7 AI PFlops (petaflops) super compute facilities created at Delhi and a 5 AI PFlop facility in Kolkata.
