Context:
India has recently accepted France’s invitation to co-chair the AI Action Summit (Feb 10 11, 2025) in Paris. This is the third major global AI summit, after U.K. (2023) and South Korea (2024). The Paris summit will expand discussions beyond AI safety which includes innovation, public interest AI, future of work, and governance.
India’s AI Strategy: Key Priorities for Paris
- India has an opportunity to:
- Amplify the Global South’s concerns in AI governance.
- Position itself as a leader for AI policymaking.
- Host the next AI Action Summit.
- Democratising AI Access
- Advocate for equitable AI infrastructure beyond computing power:
- Data sets, cloud computing, foundation models, and development platforms.
- Promote open source AI to counter restrictive export control measures.
- Support distributed computing solutions and AI safety tools (e.g., watermarking).
- Developing AI Use Cases for the Global South
- AI applications should address mainly local needs, rather than be generic global solutions.
Key sectors includes
- Healthcare: AI driven early disease detection tailored to regional systems.
- Education: Personalised learning for diverse linguistic and educational contexts.
- Agriculture: AI enabled products tailored to regional farming environments.
- Proposal for development of an AI use case resource for the Global South.
Contextualizing Risks of AI for the Global South
- AI risks take a very different form than is the case of the Global North. Important risks for the Global South.
- Cultural erosion due to AI models trained on predominantly Western datasets.
- Lack of localized AI safety measures tailored to developing economies.
- Proposal to establish an AI harm repository to document real world AI risks in the Global South.
Looking Ahead: India’s Potential Leadership in AI Governance
- As co-chair of the Paris summit, India can push the Global South’s AI agenda.
- A successful engagement at Paris could strengthen India’s bid to host the next AI Action Summit.
- India is uniquely positioned as a bridge between AI superpowers (Global North) and developing nations.
