\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>ndia celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, \u201cearly versions of true super intelligence\u201d could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India\u2019s prime minister, Narendra Modi: can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to raise the prospects of its 1.4 billion people?<\/p>\n Modi\u2019s hunger to harness AI\u2019s capability is great. He compared it on Thursday to a turning point that resets the direction of civilisation, such as \u201cwhen the first sparks were struck from stone\u201d. The most common analogy heard among the thousands of visitors to the summit was the dawn of electricity, but Modi was talking about fire.<\/p>\n <\/span>Visitors at the AI Impact summit in Delhi.<\/span> Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty<\/p>\n His desire to use AI to supercharge Indian economic growth is matched by that of the big US tech companies. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all played prominent roles at the summit, announcing deals to get ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude AIs into more people\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n The Trump administration, seeing AI as central to its battle for supremacy with China, was clearing the path for the three AI companies. The US government signed the Pax Silica, a technology agreement that binds India closer to US tech and away from Beijing.<\/p>\n At the signing, Jacob Helberg, the US under secretary of state for economic affairs, emphasised the threat from China if India should even think about looking elsewhere for its AI. \u201cWe have seen the lights of a great Indian city extinguished by a keystroke,\u201d he said, in an apparent reference to a suspected Chinese cyber-attack on Mumbai in 2020.<\/p>\n India lacks the semiconductors, power plants and vast gigawatt datacentres to go it alone. In common with most other countries, it faces a choice between US and Chinese AI models. Which they choose could have profound consequences for who controls India\u2019s future, because if AI\u2019s power emerges as predicted, it will not only tweak economic and social structures, but become their new bedrock.<\/p>\n Stuart Russell, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, who closely follows India\u2019s progress, said: \u201cIf we get to AGI [artificial general intelligence], AI is going to be producing 80% of the global economy. All manufacturing, most agriculture, all services will be just done; managed by AI, produced by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>The US government signed the Pax Silica agreement, which binds India closer to US tech and away from Beijing.<\/span> Photograph: Rajat Gupta\/EPA<\/p>\n Imagine, he said, an Indian village priced out of having a health centre. In the future, AI could design the hospital and \u201calong comes a bunch of giant quad copters carrying the materials, and a bunch of robots come and assemble everything. Two weeks later, you\u2019ve got a hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n In this scenario, technology becomes integral to a country\u2019s wellbeing. Elements of sovereignty can be fought over, but how successful that will be remains to be seen. AI\u2019s power is such that its controller gains enormous leverage.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s chief executive, Dario Amodei, told the summit: \u201cIt may sound absurd, but AI can even help India achieve a standout 25% economic growth.\u201d If that were to happen, it would take India to a per-capita GDP in a decade that is equivalent to Greece today. How could a leader resist?<\/p>\n Modi\u2019s tech secretary, Shri Krishnan, said India realised it must ally with like-minded countries to ensure it did not become \u201censlaved\u201d. It is a high-stakes decision.<\/p>\n India appears unlikely to turn to China, for now. It has the AI models, but there are tensions on the Himalayan border, and Chinese companies and leaders were scarce at the summit.<\/p>\n Will India thrive with US AI? Silicon Valley companies talk of cooperation not control. Chris Lehane, OpenAI\u2019s head of global policy, said: \u201cWe don\u2019t see India as a customer, we see it as a strategic partner.\u201d<\/p>\n US officials framed the deal with India as an alliance of two nations that \u201cbroke centuries of colonial rule\u201d, and as \u201ctwo great democracies saying we will build together\u201d.<\/p>\n The Guardian asked Michael Kratsios, Donald Trump\u2019s science and technology adviser, if India risked being controlled by the US under a form of digital colonialism.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say it is actually the opposite,\u201d he said. \u201cAny country that builds on top of the American AI stack will have the most open, independently controlled, secured stack the world has to offer. And that is why we are soon keen to share it with so many countries that are prioritising their AI sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>A visitor takes part in a virtual reality demonstration at the summit.<\/span> Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty<\/p>\n Russell sees another possibility. \u201cI think the American companies want to get in at that high-school and middle-school level to create basically a bunch of AI addicts who can\u2019t tie their shoelaces without the help of AI,\u201d he said. \u201cSilicon Valley has always been about eyeballs. You monetise later and it works. Google and Facebook generate vast amounts of money.\u201d<\/p>\n Could India build its own AI? It is investing billions in datacentres and semiconductor capacity, but it takes years to come online.<\/p>\n <\/span>Narendra Modi with Emmanuel Macron in the audience at the AI Impact summit.<\/span> Photograph: St\u00e9phane Lemouton\/Sipa\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n India can press US tech companies to adapt their AIs to its kaleidoscope of languages and cultures, and attempt to insist on guardrails. There is much at stake.<\/p>\n As the summit came to a close, Joanna Shields, a former Facebook and Google executive and ex-UK minister for internet safety, warned: \u201cIf we have a world where we are accepting models from just the global north, we will lose so much of our cultural diversity, our uniqueness as people, wherever we come from \u2026 We don\u2019t want to develop a monoculture based on a handful of models that everybody uses around the world and we lose that richness of who we are, what makes us human.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" India celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, \u201cearly versions of true super intelligence\u201d could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week. It\u2019s a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India\u2019s prime minister,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[10328,4850,19648,70,6432,426,2591,812,722],"class_list":{"0":"post-44963","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-delhi","9":"tag-giants","10":"tag-harness","11":"tag-hit","12":"tag-hungry","13":"tag-india","14":"tag-summit","15":"tag-tech","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}