India’s ‘UPI Moment’ in AI has Arrived

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THE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER OF AIM. Monday, Jul 15, 2024 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here By Amit Naik India’s UPI success story is nothing short of remarkable. It has not only democratised transactions for millions of people in the country but also made a significant impact globally. This achievement is now being replicated in initiatives such as ONDC and Namma Yatri, aiming to democratise e-commerce and transportation for all.  A few weeks ago, when we met Pramod Varma, the brain behind Aadhaar & India Stack and the founding architect of the Beckn Protocol, AIM was convinced that a similar success story is on the horizon for generative AI adoption in India. Read on to discover more. Last year, AIM questioned when India's ‘UPI Moment’ in AI would arrive, pointing towards the potential for a locally contextualised AI model as a digital public good.  However, the chief architect of India’s digital transformation, Varma, holds a slightly different opinion.  “We will see a UPI moment in India for generative AI through the usage of AI, more than the production of AI,” he said, expressing uncertainty about whether another OpenAI will emerge from India, but wishing AI companies in India (the likes of Krutrim AI, Sarvam AI, and SML) well on their efforts in building advanced foundational models.  Varma is currently the chief technology officer at EkStep Foundation and is building digital public infrastructure (DPI) for generative AI in India through People+AI’s initiative of Open Cloud Compute.  All Eyes on India  A few days ago, OpenAI vice president Srinivas Narayanan expressed his excitement over the potential collaborations and praised the diversity in AI applications being built in Bengaluru. “It is inspiring to see the ambition in their thinking and the diversity in the applications,” he said.  In an exclusive interview with AIM, Varma expressed a similar excitement. He believes that India's ‘UPI moment’ in AI will arrive quicker if we maximise the utility of existing models to address challenges instead of building foundational models like GPT-4 from scratch.  “I have a feeling that we will see generative AI penetrate through art, media, the movie industry, transport, commerce—everywhere,” said Varma, adding that he sees no reason for it not to happen because we currently live in a very low-performing equilibrium. A recent report showed that currently, only 22% of Indians leverage generative AI for work purposes in healthcare and research, while 76% plan to use it in the next two to five years. “I can only say there is no human being, who is not working on generative AI,” said CP Gurnani, the former Tech Mahindra chief, at AIM’s recent MachineCon GCC Summit.  “The Indian path in AI is different. We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM. Let people with capital, let people who want to pedal ships do all that stuff… We are here to make a difference, and our aim is to put this technology in the hands of people,” said Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys.  On the contrary, Ola Krutrim chief Bhavish Aggarwal is of a slightly different opinion. He recently said that India has the largest number of developers, silicon designers, data, and IT services in the world. “India can do to AI what China did to manufacturing,” he added, saying that it won’t automatically happen unless we make it happen.  DPI to the Power of AI  Scale matters. In a recent interview, Nilekani also discussed how India has benefited immensely from DPI, Aadhaar, and UPI and how AI could lead to similar transformative changes.  He said that applying AI at a population scale could have an even greater impact. “We call this DPI to the power of AI,” Nilekani added, emphasising that AI can elevate DPI to the next level. Varma explained that AI is already integrated into GST and Aadhaar. “AI is used extensively within GST to detect circular loops, fraudulent patterns, and process invoices,” he said, highlighting its widespread application. What’s next? “You can now introduce voice interfaces. If you can enable voice-based payments, UPI will go through the roof. We will see AI play into DPI to expand further and bring efficiency and expansion of DPI.”  He believes that India’s future is voice-based AI. "Indian entrepreneurs should really look at voice as a completely new human-computer interaction method. It would be very powerful, and I think it's gonna happen because voice is natural to humans," said Varma.  In a previous interaction with AIM, Sarvam AI also said that it is working on a voice-based Indic LLM and plans to release it this year.  Recently, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) AI and Robotics Technology Park (ARTPARK) open-sourced 16,000 hours of spontaneous speech data from 80 districts as part of Project Vaani, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s flagship AI initiative, BHASHINI. Read the full story here. AI Forum for India. Our Discord Community for AI Ecosystem, In collaboration with NVIDIA. Join Today >> TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK >> Kaggle is a Humbling Machine for PhD Students Kaggle competitions, the hardcore community that organises challenges for machine learning experts, brings out both the best and the worst in participants, prioritising application-based expertise over theoretical knowledge of the subject.  Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Fast.ai, highlighted that PhD students “generally fail miserably” at these competitions if they expect easy wins. This conversation came to light after Thomas Wolf, the co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face, recently shared about a super-impressive AI competition, the Artificial Intelligence Math Olympiad (AIMO), where AI models, not individuals, competed to solve challenging maths problems of the International Math Olympiad level for prize money up to $10 million.  Read more here. People & Tech >> Intuit India's WiDS Conference Inspires 130+ Data Scientists Intuit, the global financial technology platform behind Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, recently concluded the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference held at their Bangalore office on June 27.  The event brought together over 130 data science professionals from academia, startups, GCCs, and IT services. The insightful sessions featuring a variety of speakers, including leading data science experts, left the attendees feeling empowered and inspired. Check out more details about the event here.  This Startup is Drawing Customers Away from Datadog & New Relic Middleware, a two-year-old startup from Ahmedabad, is rapidly challenging established cloud observability tools like Datadog and New Relic. “Many companies that were previously Datadog and New Relic customers are now migrating to our platform. The number is significant, reaching high double digits,” said Laduram Vishnoi, the founder and CEO of Middleware.  Read the full story here. This Coimbatore-based AI Lab Offers NVIDIA H100 GPUs In today’s time, when just about everyone wants to get their hands on NVIDIA GPUs, Jarvislabs, a GPU cloud platform, has announced that it will provide H100s on demand. “We are partnering with companies across the globe, and we already have access to thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs,” said Vishnu Subramanian, the founder of Jarvislabs, in an exclusive interview with AIM. He said that Jarvislabs, just like Hugging Face, isn’t looking at buying GPUs directly but wants to partner with established companies and hyperscalers.  Check out the full interview here. AIM TV >> Generative AI in Healthcare & Life Sciences in India  In Conversation with Rowland Illing Having completed his undergraduate paediatric training at St John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, Rowland Illing, the chief medical officer at AWS, holds Indian doctors in high esteem.  In an exclusive interview with AIM, he shared the transformative potential of generative AI in India’s healthcare sector, emphasising its role in bridging the healthcare disparity between urban and rural areas and democratising access to advanced medical technologies and care. AIM EVENTS >> MachineCon USA 2024 MachineCon 2024, the second edition of this prestigious event, will take place on July 26th at the elegant 583 Park Avenue in New York. Renowned as the biggest exclusive gathering of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and analytics leaders in the United States, MachineCon 2024 will feature top leaders, innovators, and experts in AI, machine learning, and data science.  Highlights of MachineCon 2024 include the AI100 Awards, recognizing exceptional contributions to AI and data science, and a focus on generative AI's impact on business and society. This summit promises to be an essential convergence for professionals dedicated to driving innovation and excellence in AI and analytics. More about MachineCon 2024 here. AIM SHOTS >> OpenAI is reportedly working on Project 'Strawberry’, a new AI technology aimed at enhancing reasoning capabilities and enabling autonomous AI agents to perform in-depth research and long-horizon tasks. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has achieved a remarkable $3.4 billion in revenue, primarily driven by its ChatGPT Plus subscription service, which alone contributed $1.9 billion. Hugging Face recently announced its profitability with a 220-member team, maintaining a largely free and open-source platform.  Samsung recently announced its plans to upgrade Bixby with generative AI, powered by its proprietary Samsung Gauss model, to rival ChatGPT and enhance its functionality across smartphones, smartwatches, TVs, and home appliances, debuting with the One UI 7 update later this year. Microsoft's new AI-powered Copilot+ PCs, featuring Snapdragon® X Elite and X Plus processors, are now available for pre-order in India at an introductory price of INR 113,900. Researchers from Tencent recently unveiled the Internet of Agents (IoA), a flexible, scalable framework designed to enhance LLM-based multi-agent collaboration by addressing limitations such as ecosystem isolation, single-device simulation, and rigid communication pipelines. Phenomenal AI, an Indian startup, has launched the country's first text-to-video AI platform to help users create high-quality videos from text inputs quickly and cost-effectively. Together AI has launched FlashAttention-3, significantly boosting GPU utilisation to 75% on NVIDIA H100, doubling processing speed, and reducing memory usage, enhancing efficiency for Transformer architectures and large language models. Oracle launched Exadata Exascale, a cloud-based intelligent data architecture promising up to 95% reduction in infrastructure costs, offering high performance and scalability for AI, analytics, and mission-critical workloads. Indegene recently partnered with Microsoft to advance generative AI services for global life sciences companies, focusing on enhancing innovation, efficiency, and scalability across commercial, medical, regulatory, and clinical functions. Download our mobile app Access our stories, video content and events on the go. 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