Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, we’re examining the tech industry’s push for influence in two places separated by a time difference of 13 hours and 30 minutes. The first is where tech sees its next big market, the second its home turf. My colleague Robert Booth reports from last week’s India AI Impact summit, where tech companies pledged to spend tens of billions in the coming year to build customer bases and datacenters in the subcontinent. Dara Kerr and Lauren Gambino reported from Silicon Valley, where billionaires are marshalling their wealth to influence California’s politics at greater levels than they ever have before.
AI in Modi’s India
India is seeking to position itself as the world’s third AI power behind the US and China, a desire that was on full display last week at the India AI Impact summit. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, expressed enormous enthusiasm for the technology at the conference in Delhi, likening it to “when the first sparks were struck from stone”.
At the summit, Modi laid out his vision for AI in India, arguing the world shouldn’t let the US and China dominate the AI race and that India shouldn’t accept American or Chinese hegemony in the space.
“We must prevent an AI monopoly. Many nations consider AI to be a strategic asset, and therefore it is developed confidentially and its availability is carefully managed.
“However, our nation India holds a different perspective. We believe that technology like AI will only truly benefit the world when it is shared and when open source code becomes available,” he said.
Presentations at the summit focused less on automation of white-collar work, as is hoped for and feared in the US and Europe, and more on applications that the tech companies argued could raise the prospects of India’s 1.45 billion people: predicting monsoons; automating medical diagnoses; increasing agricultural yields. Bill Gates visited a banana plantation where farmers use AI to spot disease and call in drones to spray pesticide. In an effort to tap into India’s national sporting obsession, Google even unveiled an AI cricket coach. (Gates’s appearance at the summit was brief. Amid ongoing attention to his links to Jeffrey Epstein, the Microsoft founder suddenly cancelled his speech.)
OpenAI’s co-founder paid lip service to Modi’s goal of sharing, even though his company famously shares little about its AI’s inner workings: “Democratization of AI is the best way to ensure that humanity flourishes. On the other hand, centralization of this technology in one company or country could lead to ruin … Some people want effective totalitarianism, in exchange for a cure for cancer. I don’t think we should accept that trade-off.”
Tech giants are spending heavily in India, whether they agree with Modi’s vision or…
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