New Delhi, February 20 India is focusing on a model where the government, philanthropists, and the private sector can collaborate to ensure that affordable computing resources are accessible to all, said Statistics Secretary Saurabh Garg on Friday.
Speaking at a session titled 'Building Public Interest AI: Catalytic Funding for Equitable Access to Compute Resources' at the AI Impact Summit, Garg said, "The focus is not on rationing, but on intelligent prioritization (of access to computing resources). I believe that is the key to enabling platforms."
He said that philanthropic organizations will play a significant role, as their focus is on ensuring that everyone benefits from AI.
"Therefore, the government, philanthropic organizations, and the private sector can collaborate to ensure that affordable computing resources are accessible to all. I believe this is the model we are looking at, and it will ensure experimentation in the future," he stated.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will definitely transform the world, and the question is whether this transformation will be equitable, inclusive, and aligned with public interest.
"And I think that's really the key issue, which concerns many people. The AI Summit itself was built around the guiding principles of people, planet, and progress. Therefore, the concept is that AI must ultimately serve human welfare, development, and enable shared prosperity," he said.
Referring to the Working Group's discussions, Garg noted that six foundational pillars need to form the backbone of the collective roadmap for the future.
"Compute, undoubtedly, is today's defining barrier. Access to GPU accelerators is a major issue for all AI ecosystems. But the challenge is how to make it accessible, affordable, and global, rather than concentrated in a few regions," he said.
He also stated that they are focusing on innovation and how that can be a public interest infrastructure.
However, infrastructure alone would not be sufficient, he added.
He noted that the skill gap is widening.
"So, how can we consider capability diffusion, focusing on joint research, shared standards, open platforms, and mutual learning? What needs to be done for this responsible deployment is so that we can link innovators to computing resources and citizens to trustworthy, AI-enabled services," he said.
Equally important is governance, where the framework needs to be robust enough to build trust, yet flexible enough to adapt to diverse social and cultural contexts.
Open source, and possibly a modular AI tax, would help enable localization without creating dependencies, he pointed out.
In another separate session at the summit, Alexandria Walden from Google said, "I think it's important for companies to have a programmatic approach to stakeholder engagement, so we need to have ways in which we're regularly engaging with stakeholders in general, not just on a specific product question."
She also stressed the need to consult specifically on a product to have a sort of process and way to do that.