Microsoft Corp.’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella kicked off his India visit with a straightforward Artificial Intelligence (AI) pitch to Indian businesses: start deploying AI systems quickly, or fall behind. “The first [imperative] is to just adopt some of these products like Copilot fast,” Mr. Nadella told an audience of business and technology executives here on Wednesday, referring to the company’s interactive chatbot product.
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Mr. Nadella compared the AI wave to Great Britain’s massive investments in rail transportation, arguing that investments in the technology could boost India’s GDP. “In India’s case … this is one of the highest growth markets, you see the buoyancy of it, the government and all of you have high ambitions for what’s going to happen even by 2025,” Mr. Nadella said.
Mr. Nadella’s visit comes as firms such as Microsoft and Google, Inc. see India as a promising market both as sources for AI talent, as well as in terms of big corporate firms that can buy AI products for their own businesses.
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AI skilling
Mr. Nadella also announced that the firm would provide AI skilling opportunities to 20 lakh Indians by 2025. “Making sure that [the Indian workforce has] the skills in order to be able to thrive in this new age is the most important thing that any of us can be doing,” he said.
Puneet Chandok, who recently joined as the India president at Microsoft, expressed optimism that AI talent from India would make a significant contribution to the sector. “Every sixth AI researcher and technologist in the world is coming from India,” he said, adding that a quarter of the new workforce in coming years would be from India.
Mr. Nadella referred to ‘Moore’s law,’ which essentially amounts to the principle that computing power constantly increases at lower cost. “Moore’s law is very much alive when it comes to AI,” Mr. Nadella said, seeking to assuage concerns on the resource-intensiveness (and high cost) of AI applications. “The cost curves of AI are only going to come down,” he said.
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Regulating AI
The Union government has exhibited openness to letting Big Tech firms such as Microsoft and Google develop and deploy AI applications quickly. In response to a query on Tuesday, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that “The only consistent agenda we have [when meeting AI developing firms] is that … you can only offer AI that is safe and trusted in India.”
Mr. Chandrasekhar referred to a Google Bard chatbot response from November, which called two right-wing news platforms ‘biased,’ and said that experimental models need to be supervised. “You can’t ‘trial’ a car on the road and when there is an accident say, ‘whoops, it is just on trial. You need to sandbox [such models].”
(The author was hosted in Mumbai at Microsoft’s invitation.)