Global AI Conclave: India poised for AI dominance with superior regulatory approach, says Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng said that Coursera witnessed the second fastest enrollment for its generative AI course from India, accounting for 20,000 of the total 90,000 enrollments within the first month

Andrew Ng, one of the most influential voices in the world of artificial intelligence, believes that India is well positioned to be the global leader in the nascent but rapidly growing field. This is because of a higher rate of AI skill penetration and the sheer amount of interest for the technology in the country.

"When there's a new technology like generative AI, it shakes up the global world order and there are new opportunities for everyone - for small companies to become larger and for big companies to do even better" Ng said during a fireside chat at CNBC-TV18 and Moneycontrol Global AI conclave on December 16.

"India has as good a chance as any other country and I think much better than most, based on AI skill penetration, the sheer amount of enthusiasm we're seeing at Coursera as well as some of the things," said Ng who cofounded online learning platform Coursera in 2012 and is currently serving as its board chairman. He also founded the AI-focused educational technology company DeepLearning.ai in 2017.

Ng said that Coursera saw the second fastest enrollment for its generative AI course from India, accounting for 20,000 of the total 90,000 enrollments within the first month. This reflects the amount of interest and high concentration of AI interest in the country, he said.

Read: Second fastest enrollment of Generative AI course from India: Andrew NG, co-founder, Coursera 

Ng also cited Stanford University's AI Index report which mentioned that India has the highest AI skill penetration rates in the world, even higher than the United States, based on statistics from professional networking platform LinkedIn.

"This makes me very bullish about the future of AI in India" he said during the fireside chat.

Ng's venture studio AI Fund is also actively evaluating opportunities and investments in the country.

"We have active activities right now in India, exploring one specific application. And I think that there'll be many of those opportunities in India and around the world in the future," Ng said.

Read: Global AI Conclave: 'India has highest AI skill penetration...'; key takeaways from top industry stakeholders

To be sure, Ng mentioned that the United States is clearly ahead of all the countries at the moment.

"What happened was a lot of the early innovation work was really done by two teams - OpenAI and Google Brain. And then in the past several years, some people left these two teams and started other companies. This is why at least at this moment in time, the skill set in deep tech generative AI is actually very concentrated just in Silicon Valley" he said.

Ng, who had earlier founded the Google Brain research lab in 2011, mentioned that the knowledge is however being disseminated in a very quick manner now, which has resulted in many other pockets of rapidly rising talent in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, China, and the United Arab Emirates.

"Whenever the technology landscape shifts under our feet, as it did with Generative AI that significantly changes what we can do with AI, it sort of changes the rules of the road. This creates a lot of new opportunities for anyone to build on top of the new technology infrastructure. I think India really has a lot of the infrastructure and talent and know-how to have as good a shot as almost anyone at being one of the leaders in the future in generative AI" he said.

Ng also mentioned that fears over AI technology are "overblown" and credited India's approach towards AI regulation.

"India has taken a relatively light touch (approach to regulation), which in my opinion is superior to some of the things going on in the United States and in the European Union. I think that having good regulation on AI applications was a very positive step forward" he said.

For instance, Ng said if someone is building a medical device, or building an underwriting piece of software to decide whether to make a loan or not, or building a self driving car, regulations should demand that such applications be safe and reasonably unbiased, and so on. "When we talk about applications, we can reason about the risks. And we do want regulators to give people clarity on what to do, what not to do and to protect citizens" he said.

"Where both the US (United States) and the European Union have gone wrong is proposing regulations that regulate the technology rather than the applications" Ng said.

Ng said that if one regulates the core technology, it usually leads to slowing down the overall progress and all the applications. It is also difficult to protect consumers by regulating the technology layer, he said.

Attempts to put in regulations such as putting in place burdensome reporting requirements for building large AI models or seeking for companies to apply for license before building such models would be "pretty tragic, slow down innovation and most damagingly, it will slow down the release of open source" he said.

Ng said that stifling open source will be detrimental for almost everyone else, since many countries that do not have organisations such as OpenAI or Google will be left behind.

On December 13, India and 27 other countries adopted a New Delhi declaration on artificial intelligence that emphasises on increasing collaboration, inclusion and developing a governance framework on artificial intelligence.

Over the next few months, the Indian government will work with other countries, and hold another GPAI (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence) meeting next year to discuss the AI governance framework.

Palo Alto Networks presents the CNBC-TV18 Moneycontrol Global AI Conclave, in collaboration with EY as the Knowledge Partner and Google, Yotta Infrastructure, and Reliance Industries Limited as Associate Partners, with Townhall serving as the Technology Partner.