We welcome India's preparations to take on the AI (AI) challenge. The technology is important not only in its generative avatar, but also in its multifaceted form that captures the nation's imagination since ChatGpt's 2022 debut, but also in a multifaceted form that fundamentally changes the concept of productivity.
An economy that fully deploys AI will be transformed into a global competitiveness. Unlike previous advances in information technology, where the origins of the country had no substantial impact on the ability of people and businesses to use them, AI is considered an enabler of geopolitical power.
The bar is installed, refusing not only to access the algorithm for others, but also to reject other important secrets held within it. Some of these may help us understand potential biases and the tendencies to hallucinate these tools. The hardware is also kept nearby. The US has banned China from exporting advanced microprocessors (GPUs) used for genai, for example, and India has placed it on its list of countries that can only distribute access to cutting-edge chips.
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From this perspective, India needs to display scrambles to enhance its AI capabilities.
As MINT reported on Wednesday, the government is cracking down on plans to develop AI chips in India, with the Advanced Computing Development Centre (C-DAC) leading the chip design effort. It is an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, founded in 1988. We developed a supercomputer based on large-scale parallel processing.
It is not taken for granted that it can bring out AI chips that rival those of world leader nvidia, but it is important to enhance AI-CHIP capabilities by recruiting the right talent and providing the equipment and incentives needed for success.
Chip manufacturing is difficult. Even to make chips, India could only attract projects of wafers with circuit sizes over 20 nanometers, but five-fifths of that size are usually deployed for larger models of AI. It is not clear whether contracted chip makers like Taiwan's TSMC can manufacture C-DAC designs, so India needs to significantly bolster its R&D efforts to create fabs that can generate the kinds of chips that run AI.
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It's not a hardware issue either. China's destructive AI splash with a low-cost deep seek model is suspected of using very advanced chips for slying, but is probably enabled by a clever software engineering workaround.
The model was developed by a research unit of a Chinese hedge fund and points to China's highly evolved digital talent. It depends on an educational system that achieves quality at all levels, from elementary schools to specialized research institutes. In the basic depths, we have seen a thousand flowers bloom. AI papers are being discussed.
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In contrast, Indian schooling remains patchy, with excellence being an exception rather than a rule. For basic breakthroughs, there is the largest pool of young people who can achieve the proficiency required in any field of research. However, realizing this possibility requires significant improvements in governance and significant investment in education and reward structures.
Improvement of India's AI capabilities is an important objective. However, it takes much more time than the efforts of a single agency or ministry. We call for extensive efforts, including academia and risk capital, and appropriate regulations. So AI is useful for all society, like education.
