Govt not planning any law to regulate AI growth in India: IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

At a time when several top leaders in the technology industry including Elon Musk, Zoho chief Sridhar Vembu and others have raised concerns and called for an immediate need for regulations for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Union IT and Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has informed the parliament that they are not planning to regulate the growth or set any laws for AI in the country. He, however, said that the government has already started making efforts to standardise responsible AI and even promote the adoption of the best practices.

“The government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country” he said in a written response in Lok Sabha on Wednesday. Nonetheless, the IT minister acknowledged that there are ethical concerns and risks of bias and discrimination associated with AI.

These concerns have been highlighted in the National Strategy for AI (NSAI) released in June, 2018, he said. “To address the ethical concerns and potential risks associated with AI, various central and state government departments and agencies have commenced efforts to standardise responsible AI development, use and promote the adoption of best practices,” the minister said in the response. “In addition, NITI Aayog has published a series of papers on the subject of ‘Responsible AI for All’

Vaishnaw believes that the expansion of AI will have a ‘kinetic effect’ on entrepreneurship and business development in India, the ministry asserted. “AI is a kinetic enabler of the digital economy and innovation ecosystem. Government is harnessing the potential of AI to provide personalised and interactive citizen-centric services through digital public platforms,” he said.

When asked about the steps that the government is taking on ethical AI practices, Vaishnaw revealed that they are planning to harness the potential of AI to offer personalised and interactive citizen-centric services through digital public platforms.

The minister informed that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity), along withCentre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is currently working on a proof-of-concept project on AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform) that will provide a common computing platform for AI research and knowledge assimilation;

Additionally, he announced that this AI computing infrastructure will be used across technology innovation hubs, research labs, scientific communities, and industry and startup institutions with National Knowledge Network.

“The PoC for AIRAWAT is developed with 200 petaflops Mix Precision AI Machine, which will be scalable to a peak compute of One AI Exaflop,” Vaishnaw said, adding that National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up a Centre of Excellence in AI, that will offer AI as a service through on Meghraj cloud with 7 AI PFlops (petaflops) super compute facilities created at Delhi and a 5 AI PFlop facility in Kolkata.;

In a separate question regarding OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Wednesday, “While it has made significant strides, there are still many challenges with these types of models.”

The IT ministry’s written response comes at a time when some technology experts including researchers and CEOs were vocal about an immediate pause on the training of AI systems like ChatGPT. Twitter owner Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are among the high-profile names who in an open letter, signed to urge halting the rollout of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Last Wednesday, a letter titled ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter’ was posted on the website of the Future of Life (FLI) Institute. It said, “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

Global technology company Zoho's CEO and co-founder Sridhar Vembu on Monday also expressed his concerns on the potential impact of AI regarding the future workforce, saying that AI poses a serious threat to several programming jobs. The Zoho chief tweeted that he along with some industry leaders had also written an open letter to the central government, calling for an AI policy in the country.

A recent report from Goldman Sachs estimates around 300 million jobs could be affected by generative AI, meaning 18% of work globally could be automated — with more advanced economies heavily impacted than emerging markets. The report also predicts two-thirds of jobs in the US and Europe “are exposed to some degree of AI automation,” and around a quarter of all jobs could be performed by AI entirely.