'Clearly in the first group', Ashwini Vaishnaw pushes back on IMF’s AI preparedness ranking for India

Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw was speaking at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos on November 20

• India's IT minister disputes IMF's AI readiness ranking, claims top-tier status.
• Vaishnaw highlights India's progress across all five AI architecture layers
• Stanford ranks India third in AI penetration and second in AI talent

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Information and technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has pushed back against the International Monetary Fund’s ranking India as a second-tier country on artificial intelligence preparedness, insisting the country "clearly" belongs in the top group of AI-ready nations.

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva outlined the fund’s newly created "Index of Preparedness" to assess how ready countries are for the AI.

She said the IMF groups countries into "those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who are saying what the heck is happening". This, she said, is based on four parameters: physical infrastructure, labour skills, diffusion of AI into the economy and regulation and ethics.

"Not surprisingly, we have at the top a very small group of countries,” Georgieva said, naming the United States, Denmark and Singapore as the top three.

While acknowledging China, she said its scale affects its ranking. Among emerging markets, she said Saudi Arabia would be one of them.

"Actually India would be one of them because of the bet on IT that India is making that are in the higher spectrum," Georgieva said.

Vaishnaw, who was part of the panel, was asked if India, "clearly in the second grouping that Kristalina is talking about”, would need to align itself more closely with the US or China, or chart its own path?

"Actually, clearly in the first group, and the reason for that is there are five layers in the AI architecture — application layer, model layer, chip layer, infra layer and energy layer," the minister said. "We are working on all the five layers, making very good progress in all the five layers."

India’s biggest strength lies in AI applications and diffusion, a key parameter in the IMF’s framework. "On the application layer, we will probably be the biggest supplier of services to the world," Vaishnaw said. "That's going to be the biggest factor of success or successful deployment of AI because that's where ROI comes from. ROI doesn't come from creating a very large model."

Vaishnaw added that India is focusing on smaller, more efficient models rather than chasing scale for its own sake.

"95 per cent of the work can happen with models which are 20 billion or 50 billion parameters," he said. "We are creating a bouquet of such models. We already have."

These models, he said, are already being rolled out in multiple sectors to increase productivity, efficiency and effective use of technology.

Questioning the IMF’s methodology, Vaishnaw said, "I don't know what the IMF criteria has been, but Stanford places India as third in terms of AI penetration, in terms of AI preparedness, and (in the second place) in terms of AI talent."