GLOSSARY: Small Cities, Big Impact

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AIM Daily XO by Amit Naik

Tuesday, Feb 27, 2024 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here

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When Satya Nadella said, “If the Indian economy is going to be $5 trillion, the AI-driven part could be something like 10%, maybe $500 billion of it”, he wasn’t exaggerating. Generative AI is expected to add about $1.2 to 1.5 trillion to India’s GDP by 2030. Interestingly, much of the wealth generation would come from smaller towns and cities in India.

Microsoft-backed Karya is one such example, helping folks in rural India, mostly women, generate wealth. So far, the company has impacted over 35,000 individuals across 24 states, enabling them to generate a massive $800,000 by completing about 35 million tasks.

Bengaluru-based data enrichment firm NextWealth is also doing something similar. The company’s business is centred around offering employment opportunities in smaller towns while working with major customers globally.

“Ten of our customers figure in Fortune 100 companies. Overall, we have over 40 active customers, including several startups in India and the US in the AI/GenAI space,” said the MD and founder of NextWealth, Sridhar Mitta, in an exclusive interview with AIM. Before starting NextWealth in 2008, Mitta was the CTO of Wipro for two decades in the 80s and 90s.

With a network of ten centres across India and a workforce of nearly 5,000 people, the company offers a range of services providing comprehensive support in AI/GenAI pipelines, from training and deployment to enhancement of these models. It operates in key areas like computer vision and natural language processing and works with structured and semi-structured data.

“We started our first centre near Salem, in a place called Mallasamudram, listing subsequent centres at Chittoor, Hubballi, Bhilai, Mysuru, Vellore, Puducherry, Salem Town, Jaipur, and Udaipur,” said Mitta, highlighting that the idea was to identify services that fresh graduates from small towns could excel at.

Enjoy the full story here.

Hollywood has a Sora Problem

Hollywood loves drama, especially with AI, where it's always extreme – both in reality and on-screen. US director Tyler Perry recently put an $800 million studio expansion plan on hold after seeing Sora’s results and strongly feels that jobs will be lost. Perry’s not the only one worried.

Last year, thanks to the SAG-AFTRA strike, generative AI became the technology protested against for the longest time in Hollywood’s history.

Read the full story here.

Reducing Road Accidents

In 2022, India alone witnessed about 4.6 lakh cases of road accidents, in which over 1.6 lakh people lost their lives. While many factors contribute to road accidents, one of the major reasons worldwide is driver’s negligence.

Netradyne, a Bangalore-based, Make-in-India AI solution provider, has been using AI and data to address this problem by providing ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and fleet management platforms.

Read the full story here.

AI Chips for Life Sciences

In 2022, Ceremorphic, a semiconductor fabless startup based in San Jose, emerged from stealth mode to reveal a 5 nm supercomputing chip produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Almost a year later, founder Venkat Mattela announced the company’s venture into the life science industry, particularly the drug discovery space, with the introduction of an analogue computing solution. Read the full story here.

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