Aiming to attract more AI investment to the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week that will be attended by executives from major AI and Big Tech labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will attend the event, which expects 250,000 visitors.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.
Here are all the key updates from the event:
- India is setting aside $1.1 billion for its state-backed venture capital fund. The fund will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups across the country.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the US. He also said that Indians make up the largest number of students using ChatGPT.
- Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fund. Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset and Nexus Venture Partners also invested. The company now plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.
- Bengaluru-based C2i, which builds power solutions for data centers, has raised $15 million in a Series A round from Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.
- HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar said Indian IT companies will focus on making profits and not creating jobs. The comments come at a time when Indian IT stocks are falling on fears that AI will disrupt the IT services sector.
- Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said that industries such as IT services and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) could “almost completely disappear” within five years due to artificial intelligence. He told Hindustan Times that India’s 250 million youth should be selling AI-based products and services to the rest of the world.
- AMD has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop a rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s “Helios” platform.
- Anthropic said it is opening its first office in India in the city of Bengaluru. The company said the country is the second largest user of Claude after the US
- Anthropic is working with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools like Claude Code to Indian businesses. For starters, both will deploy AI tools in the telecom sector with a dedicated Anthropology Center of Excellence.
- Indian artificial intelligence company Sarvam is teasing its upcoming smart glasses called Sarvam Kaze. The company has released several models in the past few weeks, including a dubbing model, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model, and a vision model for optical character recognition (OCR).
- Indian conglomerate Adani said it is allocating $100 billion to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy in India by 2035. The company said the investment will lead to an additional $150 billion in investments in areas such as server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, sovereign cloud platforms and support industries.
- Voice AI company Cartesia has partnered with Indian orchestrator Blue Machines to deploy voice solutions for businesses with on-premises data residency.
- Cohere Labs launches a range of multilingual open scale models that support over 70 languages. These models can run on local devices. The company said it has also released models tuned for specific regions.
- OpenAI said it will open two new offices in India in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
- OpenAI has also partnered with the Tata Group to deploy 100 megawatts of computing in India, with the goal of scaling up to 1 gigawatt.
- India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the country wants to attract more than $200 billion in AI infrastructure investment over the next two years.
- Indian vibration coding startup Emergent said it hit $100 in ARR and launched a mobile app.
- Indian AI startup Sarvam has released two new open-source models: the Sarvam 30B and the Sarvam 105B.
- Sarvam also announced partnerships with Qualcomm, HMD and Bosch to deploy its AI models in devices including smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops and smart glasses.
- Voice AI startup Gnani has released a zero voice clone text-to-speech model called Vachana that supports 12 languages.
- BharatGen, a government-backed AI consortium, has released a 17 billion parameter model called Param 2 that works in 22 languages.
- Steam service JioHotstar said it will use ChatGPT to help discover content through conversational search.
- Sarvam is launching its ChatGPT competitor called Indus, which supports more Indian languages.
- OpenAI reported that 18-24-year-old users in India use ChatGPT at almost 50% in India.
- Indian technology company Tech Mahindra has released an 8 billion parameter Hindi-oriented model for educational use cases.
- UAE-based G42 has partnered with US chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing in India via a supercomputer. Abu Dhabi’s Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Center for the Advancement of Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project.
- On the sidelines of the India AI Summit, Sam Altman said concerns about how much water AI uses are “absolutely false” but acknowledged the problem of water consumption when “we’re doing evaporative cooling in data centers.”
- Oddly enough, he also said that humans use up a lot of energy growing up and processing the things around them. He thinks the arguments about ChatGPT’s power consumption are “unfair”.
“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a person,” Altman said. “It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you eat in that time to become smart.”
- India said more than 88 countries and organizations have signed the New Delhi Declaration on Artificial Intelligence for efforts to harness artificial intelligence for social and economic good. These countries included the US, China and Russia.
- India has joined the US-led Pax Silica group to create a seamless supply chain network for materials used in building AI infrastructure. Other members include the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Qatar, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Australia.