IBM's Amith Singhee highlights opportunities and challenges for India's AI potential

While speaking at the 9th Carnegie Global Tech Summit on Friday, Amith Singhee said, "Fostering an environment, especially in a country like India, where we have such a huge demand for AI, the potential is probably higher than in any country in the world. But the challenges are also very unique, with the diversity, data scarcity. We have 1000 dialects if you look beyond the 22 languages. And it's not just the dialects, it's the economic and social strata."

He further said, "Deepseek was like a validation, more than a surprise to us, that you don't need a billion dollars to build a model. If you get the engineering right, you can build these things."

Lt. Gen Raj Shukla (Retd), Member, Union Public Service Commission, said, "DeepSeek is now open-source AI models that seem to be becoming as powerful as the proprietary American models. The challenge is whether the American models will be able to monetise the technology as an exclusive product or collapse."

He further said, "The Deepseek is remarkable for more than one reason. The CEO of Deepseek takes funding from its parent company, the Chinese head fund. This allows Deepseek to focus on fundamental research, and, of late, if you have seen Ali Baba, they have been flooding the market with AI models in business and commerce. So you have the research being complimented with business and commerce..."

Arvind Gupta, Director of the Vivekananda International Foundation, sees "DeepSeek" as Vedantic and said that while India may not yet have its own DeepSeek model, the country can use this opportunity to "seek deep and seek where we are."

"I like the word DeepSeek as it's a very vedantic concept that you seek within. And I think that's what India should be doing. It may not have a DeepSeek model. This is an opportunity to seek deep and seek where we are," Arvind Gupta said.

Earlier, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, speaking at the 9th Carnegie Global Tech Summit on Friday, said that now is not the time to make any determination about DeepSeek.

When asked if the government was considering a possible ban on the Chinese AI platform DeepSeek, like the Chinese social media app TikTok, Jaishankar said he would choose to be evasive now.

"I will be deeply evasive about the answer. My honest answer is, I don't think at this time there is any determination," he said.

Earlier, on February 5, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India will have its first foundational Artificial Intelligence model in about 10 months. The Minister said that the government is going to host an open-source model like the Chinese 'DeepSeek' on Indian servers.

This comes at a time when Chinese startups have challenged the AI world. The minister said one must look at the entire India AI mission in a more comprehensive manner. He said India approved the AI mission last year, with an allocation of about Rs 10,000 crore. (ANI)