When we visited People+ai a couple of weeks ago, we had no idea we would walk into a space filled with AI engineers, volunteers and researchers, and of course, walls adorned with AI-generated art, all in line with the philosophy of ‘What can (AI) do for you?’ — straight from Tanuj Bhojwani’s LinkedIn tagline.
Under his leadership, People+ai is championing AI for India and addressing real challenges at scale with the aim to accelerate through various initiatives and government partnerships. As he put it, “We have a seat at the table… not just in building models but in creating the world’s largest use cases for AI where the difference in people’s lives is tangible”.
People+ai was born out of Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani, and Shankar Maruwada’s EkStep Foundation in June last year. This community-driven effort aims to harness AI capabilities to help a billion people. And it is being led by Bhojwani, who has been an investor, a consultant, and co-founder earlier as well.
Bhojwani explained the importance of building Indic language models and their use cases within the country. “If I put a gun to your head and tell you that you cannot use Google from next month, you will maybe push back for one or two months but then start coughing up.” Bhojwani said that everyone is accustomed to the idea of going to this magic box, typing what they think, and getting the results.
But according to him, most of the Indian population is yet to experience that type of internet because of the country’s low literacy rate. The same people are going to access the new internet multimodally, through voice and pointing the camera at things. This is why it is important to take AI to the grassroot-level of the country, and do it in the way that India does it – frugally.
People+ai is currently working on projects like Jan Ki Baat, Sthaan, and Open Cloud Compute (OCC) to make this a reality.
“I think there are problems that are going to be unique for India. Who is going to solve that?” Bhojwani asked rhetorically while explaining that copying the West for ideas is not the right way forward. He also added that the behemoth, Amazon, is shaken because of Zepto, Instagmart, and Blinkit – the same should be applicable to AI, and not playing catchup with the West.
Nilekani, the co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys, previously noted that just as India benefited hugely from Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), Aadhaar, and UPI, AI holds similar transformative potential. “AI is a very powerful technology, but it’s a technology like anything other,” said Nilekani, adding that AI needs to be used with appropriate safety and guardrails.
This is the exact principle that People+ai works on. “When it comes to the infrastructural pieces, which involves DPI and policy, we step in,” said Bhojwani.
India as the AI Use Case Capital of the World
Building AI in India is a game that’s very different from that in the West. “If you look at how much an AI solution could mean to a user, it’s much higher in India with a much larger volume,” he added. In the West, it’s about acquiring enterprise customers willing to spend millions of dollars.
But in India, it’s a high-volume, low-value game, where the AI users would not be paying so much. These people would be more comfortable using AI in their own native languages. This solution is at the population scale. For India to flourish in AI, models must be created that understand India’s linguistic nuances and cultural complexities.
Bhojwani had earlier told AIM that the foundation had been exploring the benefits of AI for quite some time. However, it was only in the past year that they decided to establish a specialised unit focused on extensively exploring AI use cases.
He believes that in a decade, India is going to be the AI use case capital of the world because of its huge population, diversity, languages and the need for specialised AI tools, be it in healthcare, education or any other field. This is exactly the idea that Nilekani puts in with ‘Adbhut India’.
While enterprises and other companies are pushing the idea of building models and acquiring big customers, it is also essential to make AI reach the roots of the country, which is what AI for Bharat stands for. People+ai is involved with stakeholders to determine if better tools and resources can be developed. “For this, we are collaborating and talking to different organisations, some in Africa, because they are also facing similar problems,” Bhojwani said.
AI for Bharat
If India is going to be the AI use case capital of the world, a substantial compute infrastructure is imperative. People+ai is actively working on developing an open compute infrastructure network to meet the rising demand for compute while promoting market competitiveness.
The idea here is to help small businesses based in Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities access computing infrastructure for training or inferencing at a lower cost compared to leveraging services from the likes of AWS, Google or Azure, which could prove to be costly.
People+ai is already working with Indian computing service providers E2E Networks, Jarvis AI Labs, NeevCloud, and Vigyan Labs and the idea is to create a network of micro data centres with interoperable standards, allowing small businesses and startups to easily plug and play, based on their specific requirements.
“However, the biggest stumbling block right now is the lack of understanding regarding the potential use cases of AI. While building chatbots is undoubtedly crucial, there is a significant amount of work that still needs to be undertaken, especially in the context of India,” Bhojwani said.
“If I had to choose one of them first, I would choose the use cases,” said Bhojwani, while explaining that every company in the world is increasingly getting interested in Indian AI models, be it OpenAI, Google, or Meta. The moat usually stands in building AI use cases as it is easier to go up that supply chain, rather than going down.
OpenAI did not build GPT-4 on day one, it took them years and several iterations to reach that level. The same would go for Indic language models built by Indian AI companies. “Being one or two generations behind the SOTA models is still good enough.”
The long-term vision of all AI companies is the same—to have indigenously developed AI models. Given the network and access to resources that the Indian AI companies have right now, the next best move would be to build a GPT-2 level model instead of competing with the West.
Building models is getting cheaper and catching up with SOTA a few years later would be astronomically cheaper. “What is the hurry?” asked Bhojwani, explaining that it is better to solidify the market that could sustain the models. “For a constrained set of resources, where would you rather apply them,” he added and said that it is good to build models, but if you had to pick what to do first, defining the use cases is more important.
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