India is one of our fastest growing markets; proactive regulation going to be key in AI: Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said India is one of their fastest growing markets with extremely talented engineers and developers working here. He further said it is important to be thoughtful and deliberate when it comes to regulation in the artificial intelligence space.

“Proactive regulation is going to be important. We are in a pretty sensible place right now, as most countries have fairly good privacy regulations”, he said at an event in Bengaluru on November 6, 2024.

In a fireside conversation with MeitY Secretary S Krishnan, Suleyman also spoke about his vision for  more personal AI companions, how AI can help India and the path to regulating this technology. Suleyman was one of the co-founders of DeepMind (now owned by Google) and later founded Inflection AI, before joining Microsoft. He is also the author of a seminal book on AI called The Coming Wave.

He said that his personal vision for AI has always been how it can be a companion as the digital world can be overwhelming for most people.

“The motivation is to create a new class of digital experience that is softer, calmer and geared towards objectives. It is key that the AI companion embodies a warm personality, so there is more focus on the emotional intelligence of the models”, he said during his keynote speech.

Talking about how India can gain, he said AI would bring knowledge to everyone’s fingertips, lowering the barrier to information, helping people at home and the workplace.

“Pre-trained models will be commoditised. Expect to see hundreds of thousands of AI agents with different types of expertise as post training requires fewer amounts of training data”, he said.

MeitY Secretary Krishnan outlined the India AI mission, an initiative by the Indian govt with an investment outlay of $1.3 Billion, with 500 million dollars going towards access to AI compute.

“It may not be worth the effort to build an LLM on our own, instead it will be better to adapt it to different sectors. We have an open data platform where various kinds of govt data will be shared. We will make even more data sets available on an anonymised basis. We are also in the process of setting up an AI safety institute” he said.

Suleyman is making his first visit to India since taking up the role at Microsoft. Known for his humanistic approach to technology, he is currently focused on advancing AI research and developing products like Copilot, an AI companion for everyone.