May 17th 2024.
During his speech at the CII Annual Business Summit, Secretary S Krishnan from the Ministry of Electronics and IT announced that the government is planning to support the development of AI compute infrastructure in partnership with the private sector. He mentioned that the government is willing to fund up to 50% of the cost of creating this infrastructure in order to speed up the process. The goal is to collaborate with various private institutions to make this capacity available quickly.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) has set a target to provide GPU-based servers, approved under the India AI Mission, by March 2026. This mission has been approved by the Cabinet with a budget of Rs 10,372 crore for the next five years, with the aim of promoting AI development in the country. With the rapid growth of AI worldwide, there has been a significant demand for GPU-based servers due to their ability to process data at a faster rate than CPU-based servers.
Krishnan also mentioned that the government has its own independent capacity for AI, which is being developed through the National Supercomputing Mission. The GPU-based capacity under the India AI mission will be set up separately. He further elaborated that the government plans to make this capacity available through a Viability Gap Funding (VGF) basis, where new capacity will be created with the support of the government. They are also considering a voucher-based model for this purpose.
Another key element of this initiative is to create a foundation model specific to India. Krishnan acknowledged the issues with existing foundation models and highlighted the efforts being made to improve them. He mentioned that the concept of large language and multimodal models is gaining popularity, and efforts are being made to make them more efficient. The government is currently engaging with experts and the private sector to achieve this.
When questioned about the potential job loss due to AI, Krishnan acknowledged the concern but stated that there is no clear answer to it. He shared that many people believe that India is well-equipped to handle the newer AI jobs due to a large pool of STEM-trained graduates and their exposure to AI. He also mentioned that India has fewer white-collar jobs in the services sector compared to other advanced countries, which may not get displaced as easily. This gives hope that the impact of job loss may not be as severe in India as it is in other parts of the world.
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