From Gen to Jan: The possible 'third path' for India

Human resource departments will need to adjust to including AI in their workforce, as humans work with AI as a co-pilot. Illustration: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

It has been almost two years since the ChatGPT launch sparked a frenzy in the technology and business world. While the brouhaha has died down a little bit, the world-changing promise of GenAI (generative artificial intelligence), and AI (artificial intelligence) overall, remains. “AI is not just a technology or a trend,” says Gartner, “it is a profound shift in how humans and machines interact.” This profound shift will reshape our businesses, economies, society, and, perhaps, humanity itself.

Businesses will need to start working with AI agents, as software-as-a-service (SaaS) transitions to AI agents-led service-as-a-software (the ‘New SaaS’). Human resource departments will need to adjust to including AI in their workforce, as humans work with AI as a co-pilot. Agents will become the new platforms, replacing ubiquitous apps, and AI-led voice will become the new user interface creating a new spike in human-machine productivity. AI is the new frontier for countries and an arms-race has begun to take leadership in this new age. Obviously, questions around ethics abound, with AI safety, privacy, deepfakes, surveillance, and environmental degradation fears playing on the minds of citizens and regulators aside.

AI is also shaping geopolitics, with the two leaders in the field, US and China, pulling ahead of other countries in developing and implementing AI. Each of these big powers is playing a different game: Big Tech is leading the charge in the US with laissez faire regulation, and the Chinese state and party is creating its own GenAI models built with informational and contextual safeguards. Other large geographies are carving out their own space, albeit in a comparatively more limited way: The European Union (EU) is focusing on regulation with the EU AI Act and the UK aims to lead the world through the Bletchley Park Global AI conference.

In this melee, where should India stand and carve out its own path? The country has undeniable technological chops. Its 6 million developers power the development centres of every Big Tech firm, the global capability centres of one of every four Fortune 500 firms, more than 100,000 startups and, above all, its world-beating IT services firms, contributing to about $200 billion of software exports. Specifically in AI, there are some green shoots, with 6,000+ AI startups, of which 340 with more than $1.5 million funding, and the government supporting it with the National AI Mission, among other initiatives.

But is it too little too late? India does not have a sovereign large language model (LLM) yet, with even countries like the UAE forging a lead here. Startup funding activity is still comparatively muted: Its highest-funded AI startup, Sarvam AI, raised $41 million as Safe Super Intelligence by Ilya Sutskever pulled in $1 billion in September as its ‘seed’ fund! Even the 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) of the National AI Mission are dwarfed by just Meta’s 600,000.

I believe, however, that India should not be looking at playing a catch-up game here, but follow a ‘third path’, one that India has demonstrated to the world in recent years: India should consider building GenAI as a digital public good (DPG). I call this JanAI or ‘GenAI for the people.’ (The term JanAI was coined by Sudhir Tiwari and me, ThoughtWorks India.)

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The world-beating success of the Indian Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is well-known. Riding on the India Stack, this ‘digitisation at population scale’ has led to 1.4 billion Indians with a digital biometric identity with Aadhaar, simplified payments at scale with UPI leading to almost half the world’s digital payments, the world’s largest vaccination campaign, and many other achievements.

Services built on top of this Stack have considerably eased health care, logistics, ecommerce, government subsidies and have led to inclusive societal growth across the country. Innumerable startups have leveraged the open APIs of the Stack to create innovative and at-scale services for citizens. The India Stack is growing global with countries like Singapore, France, UAE, and others signing up to it, and many others in the pipeline.

The true power of the Stack has been realised by offering it as a DPG (akin to clean air or defence or law-enforcement), so that it reaches every citizen; and making it open enables large companies and startups to build value and wealth on top of it. We believe that GenAI should be treated similarly in India. JanAI could be a set of LLMs built as another layer of the India Stack, where the key is that it will be offered as a public service. Thus, it will bridge the inevitable digital divide, and provide benefits for the entire population, much like Aadhaar and UPI have done.

This will also give India the opportunity to build out guardrails and safeguards around privacy, bias, and other AI ethical concerns, using Indian notions of collective and societal privacy and trust which are sometimes very different from the Western concept of individuality-oriented privacy. This is similar to Nandan Nilekani’s vision of AI as Adbhut Intelligence, where he says, “We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM... We are here to make a difference, and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people.”

We believe that this unique AI could happen through a tripartite partnership between a proactive government, our world-leading IT industry, and some leading technical institutions like the IITs. We already have governance mechanisms like UIDAI and ONDC, we need to create a similar one for JanAI. Indian companies could then ‘spin out’ their own specific fine-tuned LLMs; startups could leverage this through open APIs along with ChatGPT and others to build out innovative India-specific products; and millions of individual creators could use its awesome generative powers to build out content and creativity-led businesses. Above all, a billion-plus Indians will become AI literate; I believe that literacy will go beyond knowing language and arithmetic to how people can use AI tools in their daily lives.

In another DPG-led context, Nilekani said, “Wealth won’t trickle down, so we are raising the floor.” Let us raise the floor by combining the two biggest movements in digital technology—GenAI and DPG—into a uniquely Indian third way to create JanAI out of GenAI, and, once more, serve as a ‘GenAI for all’ model for the world.

The author is founder of AI&Beyond, which builds AI literacy in organisations, and the author of The Tech Whisperer