India should look beyond building fully sovereign AI systems and focus on open source artificial intelligence, AI pioneer Andrew Ng said, while arguing that open-source models may offer stronger protection than sovereignty alone.
Speaking to Moneycontrol in an interview on the sidelines of World Economic Forum in Davos, Ng said, "It makes sense for India to not want a different nation, friendly or hostile, or a single business to control India’s access to AI technology."
Ng is the founder of DeepLearning.AI, Managing General Partner at AI Fund and Co-Founder of Coursera.
However, Ng suggested that building everything domestically is not the only path. He drew parallels with India’s use of open technologies such as Linux and other such programming languages and said open source offers a feasible alternative.
"One relatively efficient, relatively cheap way to ensure India’s continued access to AI is not necessarily to build everything internally," he said. "It is to contribute to open source. Because if it's open, then no one can mess with it."
Pointing towards China, Ng also flagged the geopolitical implications of open models. "Chinese open source models are ahead of the US open source ones, many of them," he said.
This, he reasoned, gave China "tremendous geopolitical influence" as developers embed these models into software used globally.
Apart from this, Ng stressed the urgency of upskilling India's workforce. He warned that India's IT services and outsourcing sectors face risk if workers do not adapt.
"People that know AI will replace people that don't," he said, adding that large-scale upskilling should be treated as a national priority.
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