Data Lab | India and AI: Are we ahead of the curve?
AI
Alan Turing, a pioneer in computing, predicted in 1950 that computers would successfully simulate human intellect within a few decades, an achievement known as passing the Turing Test. Hop-skip to 2022, when a Googlesoftware engineer said his interactions with the company’s AI-powered chatbot had convinced him that it had become “sentient.” Then came ChatGPT,an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that very year, which according to analysis by data firm Similarweb reached 100 million users just two months after being launched.Whichever way we cut it,artificial intelligence (AI) has once again become the hottest buzzword in the tech world.
Can explosion of data be the reason behind AI’s latest buzz?
Data is multiplying at an unprecedented rate. We double the world's data every two years at the current rate at which humanity is producing it, and this rate is anticipated to only accelerate going forward. A Forbes report says that data will double every 12 hours by 2025, which means that between the time we wake up andgo to sleep, humanity will either be twice as smart or half as smart.
“AI has been around for the last 40 years, but the latest buzz around it can be attributed to the algorithms invented in 2012,” Dr Srinivas Padmanabhuni, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, testAIng.com, an Indian AI startup which performs security testing, ethics testing and bug finding for AI models told WION.
Dr Padmanabhuni says the newer algorithms have been able to work on all kinds of data including text, image and audio, in addition to conventional data which was purely mathematical and in tabular formats.
“With the advent of the newer version of AI, also known as Deep Learning, we can see an expansion of data to images, text and audio. The moment that happened, the application of AI suddenly exploded. Because of the expansion of the ability of analysis to image, text and audio, we’re seeing this new found interest in AI application,” explains Dr Padmanabhuni.
AI in Indian academia
Author Rajiv Malhotra in his book, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power,explains how China's ascent to dominance in the 21stcentury must be contrasted with Britain's rise to power in the 1800s. China wants to overtake the world through an AI revolution, much as how Britain did during the Industrial revolution.
Dr Balaraman Ravindran, Head, Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT Madras, explains the two criteria used to gauge success in the realm of AI in India. First, in terms of academic research and innovation, and second, in terms of the quantity and performance of AI startups in the country.
“With regards to AI research, India is still middling. We are not among the top few countries in the world in terms of research output. Even thoughpublicly reported stats from differentsources would say otherwise,these figures should be critically examined,” Dr Ravindrantold WION.
"Only a small number of Indian AI researchers are well-known outside of India, according to the number of people who cite their work. Despite this, the AI community as a whole has grown tremendously in the past few years," he adds.
As per statistics from the International Data Corporation (IDC), China is expected to more than double its investment in AI to nearly $27 billion by 2026.
“China recognised a while back that theimpact was coming from top-notch AI conferences and started incentivising people to publish in these conferences,” explains Dr Ravindran.
China’s state-funded AI research is also growing steadily.
“China is giving significant incentives to companies to spend on fundamental research. The scale is unimaginably large in China,” he adds.
A total of 48.6 billion real-time transactions were made in India in 2021, more than three times as many as its closest rival, China ($18 billion), and nearly seven times as many as the combined real-time payments volume of the world's top five economies—the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany ($7.5 billion transactions).
India is uniquely positioned with a great digital ecosystem in place. Additionally, India released an AI strategy document in 2018 that most countries don’t have.
Despite this, Dr Ravindran explains, the gap between the private and public sector is growing with the former taking lead, as they are not waiting for the government to release data. They are collecting the required data themselves.
Is India more AI positive, what does it mean for its growth?
When it comes to trusting artificial intelligence, India tops the list of countries. According to aKPMG survey, developing countries like India, Brazil, China, and South Africa are more accepting of AI, with India having a 75 per cent acceptance rate.
The study says more than half of the respondents from these countries expressed strong trust and acceptance of artificial intelligence technologies.
Additionally, it demonstrated the increased use of AI in emerging markets, particularly in the BRICS countries. However, when it came to the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, China came on the top with 75 per cent, followed by India at 66 per cent and Brazil at 50 per cent.
With theinception of AI, experts have stressed on the importance of it in key professional fields, such as ed-tech and e-commerce.
Many ed-tech companies have developed new ways to tailor education for Indian students, but AI continues to be the most efficient approach, as its key impact in the Indian education spaceis going to be in personalised and adaptive,as per Devesh Mishra, Chief Technology Officer, Physicswallah, an Indian educational technology startup that became a unicorn in June 2022 after raising a $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion, who spoke to WION.
Mishra emphasised that a student-teacherrelationship cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, since, as he believes, "online and offline education go hand-in-hand."
Aside from the education sector, trade and commerce is another significant area where India anticipates AI to show promise.
The India Brand Equity Foundation predicts that by 2025, the country's e-commerce market will be worth $111.40 billion.
Therefore, a strong AI response or data accumulation strategy is necessary for smooth customer relations.
According to N Sekar, Chief Technology Officer, Quinbay, an e-commerce AI startup, artificial intelligenceis required to create a more customised user experience, collectcustomer behaviour data and trends,which will ultimately increase productivity.
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Sekar emphasised the decline in fraudulent activities as well, noting that several e-commerce platforms are using this data to reduce such occurrences.
“By analysing the behaviour or data of fraudulent sellers and customers (example receiving a stone instead of a phone) platforms can take action on such people. All that is decreased because of the extensive use of AI or machine learning capabilities,” Sekar told WION
Can AI take away our jobs?
As per aWorld Economic Forum (WEF) report, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will result in the creation of 97 million new jobs by 2025. In the meantime, Chatbots are all the rage, and there is growing concern that an AI capable of responding to cues andquestionsin a manner that is remarkably human and in a short amount of time would be bad for the job market as a whole.
Dr Padmanabhuni thinks reinvention is the key. “We are living in an era where technology is changing every five years. So, we need to relearn in order to stay relevant. It is not a matter of job displacement, but a matter of reorientation.”
Additionally, Dr Ravindran thinksAI is very much a productivity tool and it cannot replace humans at this point.
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