NEED FOR REGULATORY FRAMEWORK

Call to action for “Data Daan” is the need of the hour to build a national movement on donating data for a digital India, where AI models accurately reflect the Indian context

- SHASHI SHEKHAR VEMPATI

THE RECENT GLOBAL Partnership for Artificial Intelligence, GPAI, Summit 2024, held in Belgrade, Serbia, was witness to growing concerns around AI safety and related regulations. With Europe’s predilection for regulations that often tend to privilege protection against harms over freedom to innovate, the EU’s AI Act consultations and the upcoming AI Action Summit in Paris dominated the conversations.

Regulatory thinking in India, it would seem, stands somewhere in between the EU’s approach and the approach of the US, which has traditionally privileged innovation over overly burdensome regulations. The India AI Mission has gained momentum with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led NDA government in its third term pushing ahead with efforts to create a public GPU cloud and the mission to make public datasets. However, a debate rages on where India must place its priorities between creating India-specific sovereign foundational models or whether India must build on its manpower strengths as the use case and AI applications capital of the world while leaving the core technology development to big-tech majors elsewhere. It is in this context that one must address the question of what kind of regulatory framework India needs to put in place at this time.