Two hundred twenty thousand public registrations, 1,400 unique speakers, and 300,000 engaged participants — these numbers are only indicative of the scale of the India AI Impact Summit that will be hosted in New Delhi, over February 16-20. Approximately 500 pre-summit events were hosted within India and across the world. For days on end, television channels have highlighted the impressive list of AI-leaders that will be reaching Delhi for what is nothing less than a striking AI carnival. From Sam Altman to Dario Amodei to Yann LeCun — most major names and firms in the AI universe will be present. This includes an impressive set of representations from across the Global South. Twenty-odd heads of State, close to fifty ministers, and thousands of CEOs and entrepreneurs from around the world will all be part of the blitz.
It is easy to get swept away by these dazzling numbers and the star cast of speakers. Yet, what is equally important is the symbolic and the pragmatic value of India hosting this summit for the present and the future of what Artificial Intelligence (AI) actually means for people, the planet, and progress. These are the three sutras that have served as the guiding principles for all seven working groups, a set of expert engagement groups, the summit agenda, and much else that will inform the main outcomes of the summit.
The India AI Impact Summit is the fourth in a series of Global AI Summits that began at Bletchley Park in the UK in 2023. Former British Prime Minister (PM) Rishi Sunak started this process. The aim then was to arrive at a “shared understanding of risk” of AI. Some of this was achieved. A declaration was published that underlined the need to “identify AI risks of shared concern” and “build risk-based policies” for individual countries. It kick-started the creation of national AI Safety Institutes. India created its own institute a little more than a year ago.
Six months after Bletchley, and with the view to keep the momentum of global cooperation going, the Republic of Korea hosted the AI Seoul Summit. The outcomes, again, focused on safety. Sixteen top AI companies made voluntary commitments on safety. Ten countries launched Safety Institutes. Yet, amongst many in India and large parts of Africa, there was an intensifying sense that developed countries’ hypnosis with the threat of AI, over-focussed on risks.
What productive gains AI can bring to the developing world was the question that the majority was asking in just about every symposium and workshop held with representatives from Africa, Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world in attendance. The conversation on the benefit of AI had not been mainstreamed yet. The doomsdayers had the pen, and the majority were in the minority. It was only a year ago, in France, that the balance began to shift. The third global gathering was fittingly titled the AI Action Summit. It was co-chaired by PM Narendra Modi.
As Ann Bouverot, the French special envoy who ran the Summit, put it, the aim was to “move past the science fiction aspect of AI to demonstrate its tangible applications”. The political needle, ever so slowly, began swinging in the direction of use cases. The fascination with what large language models (LLMs) could do with supernatural computing capabilities led to a conversation on how AI can actually help humanity. On stage in Paris, PM Modi provided a clear articulation of what this swing ought to be about. “Governance,” he made plain, “is not just about managing risks and rivalries.” “It is also,” he underlined, “about promoting innovation, and deploying it for the global good.” The focus turned to what AI is doing, and could do, for people. It turned to impact. The India AI Impact Summit is, in many ways, the strongest collective expression of the need to focus on people.
Over the last six months, public events, closed-door discussions, and parleys between government officials from across the world have had little choice but to address the importance of impact. Global CEOs fixated on frontier models, with a cult-like craze for creating superintelligence and pouring fortunes into compute, were persuasively confronted with a question they had to address: How does all this add up for the lives of people across the planet?
The techno-political needle has shifted the focus to people. Safety and risks matter, of course, but what has been made clear in India’s approach is that these are not all that matters. Leading academics and inventors who are in a frenzy over their creations were actually, and literally, forced to consider the beneficial effects of AI.
Companies got it fast. And they moved faster. Global engineering teams between the Bay Area and Bengaluru were in conversation with those in India, building applications for farmers, teachers, and doctors. The outcomes of these discussions will be on full display at the expos that might just be the most exciting part of the summit. Two Indian firms have also launched AI tools with a focus on Indic languages and rural dialects.
In sum, the news cycle is likely to be shaped by announcements on inward investments and massive names in the world of AI. But the real story of the Indian AI Impact Summit is that it has firmly placed people at the heart of the global discussion on AI. How does AI actually change lives is the central question of the week. Which is why, apart from big firms, key names in the Small Island Countries grouping and those across Africa are attending a summit in the heart of the Global South. They are not coming only to listen to the likes of Altman and Amodei; they can do that on youtube. They are coming to build a bridge for South-South cooperation. They are coming for their people.
Rudra Chaudhuri is a vice-president at the Observer Research Foundation. The views expressed are personal
