New Delhi [India], February 17 : The AI-India Impact Summit which got underway on Monday has been designed with a clear focus on outcomes. One of the key factors is a focus on how the overall AI ecosystem can be used to improve efficiency, increase productivity and create a multiplier effect for the economy.
Sovereign AI encompasses both physical and data infrastructures. It includes sovereign foundation models, such as large language models, developed by local teams and trained on local datasets to promote inclusiveness with specific dialects, cultures and practices. The IndiaAI Mission aims to build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation by democratizing computing access, enhancing data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, enabling industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects, and promoting ethical AI.
At the AI-India Impact summit tech leaders debated on open-source AI and its role in sovereignty. Calista Redmond, VP Sovereign AI at Nvidia says that nations are increasingly looking at their overarching AI story and not just one component.
"So, I look after sovereign AI for nations globally and get to talk to a lot of countries about the decisions that they're making and when they think about these decisions they're looking at their overarching AI strategy, not just one component. And what brings me a lot of hope is they're looking at the long game. They're not looking at the, you know, the first release or the first implementation and they're not looking just at hardware or the applications, they're looking at the entire stack in between. So that's, you know, the hardware, the foundational models, and all of the infrastructure that goes into building those great applications. And I think the great leveler that we've seen for decades has been open source," she said.
Mark Surman, President of Mozilla says that centralization is a barrier to sovereignty.
"That centralization actually is really a barrier, a threat to sovereignty. And so that's where the open web and open source really are quite interesting, is at the heart of the open web and Mozilla obviously has been a champion of the open web forever, and the idea of open source is that anybody anywhere can create anything on their own terms and keep it for themselves. And of course there's problems with that too, but at the heart of it it is really designed and almost the definition of creating technology in a way that allows you to have a better chance at sovereignty," he said.
The government of India has also announced sovereign AI initiatives promoting workforce development, sustainable computing and private-sector investment in domestic compute capacity. A major highlight of this year's summit will be the progress made by 12 Indian startups selected under the IndiaAI Mission to develop indigenous foundation models trained on Indian datasets and languages. These firms are building large language models and multimodal AI systems aimed at addressing India's linguistic diversity, sector-specific needs and governance requirements.