Mint DIS 2023 | Essential regulations needed for national open source initiatives: Gopichand Katragadda

The government's role should be as minimal as possible in sourcing data for national open-source initiatives, but we need the regulations in place, said Gopichand Katragadda, Founder & CEO, Myelin Foundry during a panel discussion at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit and Awards, on Friday.   

During the panel discussion on “How can companies, and society leverage Open-Source AI,” Katragadda was asked if there should be a national open-source effort to source data, or should the government get involved by providing basic infrastructure.   

To which he said, “The government's role should be as minimal as possible, we have never benefited from increasing the government’s role. But we need the regulations in place. So, if I were to have the freedom I would say, can we create a monetizable citizen, where the rights are with the citizen. And fairness is adjudicated. That way, we have the ability to get the kind of data that we need.”

The panel discussion which was moderated by Venkatesh Hariharan, Public Policy Director, FOSS India, also included Kailash Nadh, Co-Founder & CTO, Zerodha, who shared his thoughts on whether should we contextualize the open-source technology.   

He said, “Contextualisation is going to be critical. Open-Source technologies we reduce, reuse, and share freely across the globe without a lot of cultural changes required, cultural contextual adaptation required by something like AI or a language model.”  

He further said, “It's very difficult to chart the game plan. Nobody really knows what's happening. Even the people who created these things have no idea where this is going. It's that top-down approach wouldn't work because whatever has been built now has been built on 60 years of research and effort. You can't recreate it. It's very difficult to recreate that in a short period of time. So, we should do a first principles approach.”  

Recently it was reported that OpenAI is preparing to release a new open-source language model to the public. This move aims to make AI more accessible and foster innovation by allowing researchers, developers, and organizations to leverage and build upon OpenAI's AI technologies.