Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar likely to meet OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on 8th June

Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar is likely to meet Sam Altman, the founder and chief executive officer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, in India over the next few days, at a time when India is giving finishing touches to a draft law  for digital technologies that will include provisions on regulation of artificial intelligence, sources said.

At present, Altman is on a whirlwind world tour and is expected to have a pit stop of 36 hours in India, where top government officials are likely to meet him and discuss the country's flagship India AI programme, among other things.

While AI-based conversational chatbot ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since the end of last year, governments and experts are grappling with the issue of how to regulate the nascent technology.

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Days after Altman suggested an international authority to regulate advanced artificial intelligence (AI) development last month, Chandrasekhar had indicated that the government might have a different view on the matter.

“Sam Altman is obviously a smart man. He has his own ideas about how AI should be regulated. We certainly think we have some smart brains in India as well and we have our own views on how AI should have guardrails,” Chandrasekhar had said last month.

“If there is eventually a United Nations of AI – as Sam Altman wants – more power to it. But that does not stop us from doing what is right for our digital nagriks (citizens) and keeping the internet safe and trusted,” he added.

The minister highlighted that the government is exploring options to regulate AI through the prism of user harm, and the forthcoming Digital India Bill draft will deal with it.

In a recent interview with Moneycontrol, Zerodha chief technology officer Kailash Nadh cautioned that heavy regulations sought by OpenAI reeks of a conflict of interest.

"Now that they have built it, any regulation might have to grandfather them and give them an unfair advantage and a moat. And, newcomers will be stifled. There is a huge conflict of interest in them calling for really strict regulation for something that they just created," he said.

OpenAI’s Altman recently wrote a blog which suggested an inter-governmental agency like the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) to put a check on the unfettered development of advanced AI.

"Second, we are likely to eventually need something like an IAEA for superintelligence efforts; any effort above a certain capability (or resources like compute) threshold will need to be subject to an international authority that can inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security, etc,” Altman wrote in the blog that he co-authored.

"Tracking compute and energy usage could go a long way, and give us some hope this idea could actually be implementable. As a first step, companies could voluntarily agree to begin implementing elements of what such an agency might one day require, and as a second, individual countries could implement it," he added.

However, Zerodha's Nadh is not convinced about the practicality of such an international effort.

"You can write a small, simple GPT in a few hundred lines of code at home. The only limitations today may be the availability of data and server farms. And this is not a big deal for a state actor. I don't think signing a global pact saying that certain countries will not develop AI would be meaningful. The good actors might stop there, but the bad actors and rogue actors will happily continue building stuff," he said.

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