Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is creating waves all over the world, enabling ChatGPT to race to 100 million subscribers in an unprecedented two months. The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power GenAI are ground-breaking technologies that promise to alter the landscape of human lives. However, this excitement is accompanied by some unease around the loss of jobs and human agency. There are also worries about bias, environmental damage, plagiarism, and a threat to democracy itself.

Predictably, most GenAI action is happening in two countries, the US and China, and both have vastly divergent structures and world views. In the US, Big Tech is leading the charge, as it has through all the technology waves of the internet, search and social networking. The China way is different — with Chinese companies, working with the government, creating their own GenAI models built with informational and contextual safeguards.

The European Union is focusing on regulation to make GenAI ethical and responsible, and the UK aims to lead the world in global AI governance. The UAE is, surprisingly, also well-entrenched in the LLM race.

India seems left out of all this excitement. There has been a lot of talk, and some recent announcements, about creating LLMs in India, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discouraged it. We have no doubt that both the government and corporate India have the capability to build a local LLM — fine-tuned with Indian data for Indian languages, context and unique use cases. It would be more important, however, to consider the objective and aim for such an exercise.

Should India follow the Western capitalist method or the Chinese state-controlled one?

A third path

India has the opportunity to forge a third path, one that it has shown the world in recent years. Our proposition, however audacious, is that India should consider building Generative AI as a Digital Public Good (DPG) — we call this JanAI or GenAI for the people.

The amazing success of the Indian Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) story is well known. Riding on IndiaStack, this digitisation at the 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 healthcare, logistics, e-commerce and government subsidies and led to inclusive societal growth across the country.

IndiaStack is already growing globally, with countries such as Singapore, France, the UAE and others signing up. The true power of the Stack has been realised by offering it as a DPG (much like clean air, defence or law enforcement) so that it reaches each citizen; making it open enables large companies and start-ups to build value and wealth on top of it. GenAI should be treated similarly.

India could build its own BharatLLM: Trained on the rich data that IndiaStack generates and fine-tuned for Indian languages and context to solve India-specific use cases and problems.

JanAI could be a set of LLMs built as a layer of IndiaStack, where the focus would be on the offering as a public service. Thus, it will bridge the 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 guardrails and safeguards around privacy, bias, and other ethical AI concerns, using Indian notions of collective and societal privacy and trust which are sometimes quite different from the Western concept of individuality-oriented privacy.

With a tripartite partnership between a proactive government, our world-leading IT industry, and some leading technical institutions like the IITs, JanAI could be an invaluable proposition. Indian companies could then develop their own specific fine-tuned LLMs from BharatLLM; start-ups could leverage it through open APIs along with ChatGPT and others to build innovative India-specific products; and millions of individual creators could use the generative powers of JanAI to build content- and creativity-led businesses.

Bindra is the Managing Director and Founder, Tech Whisperer Ltd, UK; and Tiwari is the Global Head of Digital Engineering Center, Thoughtworks India. Views expressed are personal

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