‘India can be one of top three players of AI in the world’: Romesh Wadhwani at BT Tech Today Congress

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‘India can be one of top three players of AI in the world’: Romesh Wadhwani at BT Tech Today Congress

Romesh Wadhwani was the first one to open an AI research centre called Wadhwani AI India back in 2018.

Romesh Wadhwani, Chairman, Symphony AI, was the first one to open an AI research centre called Wadhwani AI India back in 2018.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential in the future has become a crucial topic of discussion for the tech industry. At the Tech Today Congress held today in Bengaluru today, many top industry leaders spoke about AI. Romesh Wadhwani, Chairman, Symphony AI, spoke to Tech Today Editor, Aayush Ailawadi about the responsible use of AI for industry and societal wellbeing.

Wadhwani set up the Wadhani AI in Mumbai in 2018, India’s first research institute. India is now a part of AI race and is facing competition from China and the US. Talking about the role of India in the AI revolution, Wadhwani says that it is not only India's great opportunity, but actually it is India's responsibility to be one of the top three players in AI.

“Can India be one of the top two players in AI, at this stage, I don’t see it. It can be number three in the world in AI, but that will not happen accidentally," he said.

He added further: “To become one of the top leaders in AI, India is going to require massive national scale initiatives for the application of AI ministry. And just as digital transformation, has played a big role in India's progress over the last few years with Aadhaar and UPI. There is a need for an AI transformation of many programs that the Indian government has or could plan.”

When asked if there is actually a need to put guardrails for AI, Wadhwani agreed that the world needs that at the moment. He spoke at length about how atomic energy plants are being compared to AI in terms of degree of destruction that they can cause.

"People have talked about using comparables, like the regulation of atomic energy by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Atomic energy is much easier to regulate, because it takes billions of dollars to create an infrastructure for atomic energy. Those restrictions do not apply to AI. The problem is, even well-meaning companies like Meta have put large language models into open source. So once it's an open source, everyone gets it for free. The bad actor, who gets it for free, can poison the large language model with only a small amount of training data," he explained.

He further added, “I think AI needs to be regulated for safety. It's more than just guardrails. It needs to be regulated for effectiveness and the field of purpose. Because if you're using it for limited scientific purposes, you can give a wider license to innovate. If it's going to be released to 100 million people or 1 billion people, you have to apply far greater validation and testing."

Wadhwani believes that AI will not affect jobs in agricultural sector, constructor sector and blue-collar jobs in the manufacturing sector in the coming future. He said: “Most white-collar jobs in the IT, legal, financial sectors and the creative communities will witness disruptions. Areas like Life Sciences and Healthcare will see the fastest transformation due to AI. Drug discovery and Clinical trial will be much faster."

He also added, “The software sector will also see disruptions because of generative AI will be able to do work that is now being done by junior and mid-level software engineers. Hence, they need to change their career plans to take advantage instead of getting disruptive.”