S Krishnan, MeitY Secretary, has said that the rapid advancements in the AI landscape could well be a Y2K moment. “It is an opportunity for the Indian IT industry to develop applications for deployment globally, not just within India,” he said.
Krishnan believes that many people globally are looking to India to do this, especially in the Global South, but also in Europe and elsewhere. He emphasised leveraging the STEM (science, technology, mathematics, and engineering) human resources in India to achieve this.
It may be recollected that the Y2K – Year 2000 – was a fear that computers would get confused when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. (Because computers used two digits for the year and ‘00’ might have been seen as 1900, leading to problems with date calculations. This resulted in a huge opportunity for the Indian IT industry.)
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3-pronged approach
Addressing a select group of business and industry leaders at the ‘Breakfast with businessline’ event hosted by ITC Kohenur here on Thursday moderated by businessline Editor Raghuvir Srinivasan, he said the country would follow a three-pronged approach towards artificial intelligence.
Besides promoting the building of applications over the existing Large Language Models like OpenAI, Gemini Advanced, and Llama, the government would encourage building models on top of existing open AI models and open-source models of AI and building models factoring in India’s own knowledge to create a foundational model.
He said the advent of Deepseek R1 from China gave the confidence for the country that building a foundational model can be done with frugality and frugal innovation as against resource-guzzling models.
Stating that the movement of data is common while using apps, he said the government was keenly monitoring the data movement.
“If you use Deepseek on an app or through their portal, the data go to China. One Indian company has already deployed it on their servers in India, and they say that when it is deployed on Indian servers, the data stay put in India,” he said.
Semicon mission
Krishnan said the government is in the process of developing the next edition of India Semiconductor Mission. With funds from the first phase (ISM1) nearly used up for major fabrication plants, the government is planning a follow-up edition. He, however, has not given any timeframe for the rollout of the second edition.
He said the country needed about 10-12 fabs of all types to support its broad technological goals. Not all of them require huge investments. The others are smaller and the investment sizes are smaller. Stating that the government adheres to Justice Puttuswamy’s judgment on the issue of privacy as a Fundamental Right, he said the government aimed to use data to improve services and target subsidies effectively while adhering to privacy safeguards.