Bharath Reddy & Rijesh Panicker
As details about the budget allocation for the IndiaAI mission emerge, this is an opportune moment to reassess its objectives for fostering India’s AI ecosystem and to evaluate how the government can achieve these goals. The authors argue that the government should promote open-source initiatives, adopt funding mechanisms that enable the market to evaluate value creation and innovation, and fund research to understand AI risks in an Indian context.
A recent response to a question in the Lok Sabha outlined the allocation of the budgeted Rs 10,372 crore across the seven pillars of the IndiaAI mission. A signicant share, around 44%, is directed toward building domestic computing capacity. An innovation centre and startup nancing each account for 19% of the budget, while the remainder is distributed among future skilling, an application development initiative, a datasets platform, and a safe and trusted AI initiative.
Investments in computing infrastructure are among the most signicant expenses in AI development. For instance, Meta reported spending $8.5 billion in the second quarter of this year alone on AI-related computing infrastructure. In comparison, the IndiaAI’s planned investment over a ve-year period are modest. Big tech rms are estimated to have spent $189 billion globally in 2024 and are projected to spend an additional $500 billion over the next three years on capital expenditure. Given this scale, the IndiaAI mission must carefully consider where and why it allocates funds for computing and AI research.
No comments:
Post a Comment