Aiming to attract more investment in AI to the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week that will be attended by executives from major AI and Big Tech labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.
The event, which expects 250,000 visitors, will be attended by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to address French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.
Here are all the key updates from the event:
- India commits $1.1 billion to state-backed venture capital fund. The fund will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups across the country.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India has more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the US. He also said that Indians account for most students using ChatGPT.
- Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Indian artificial intelligence startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity round. Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset and Nexus Venture Partners also invested. The company now plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.
- Bengaluru-based C2i, which makes a power solution for data centers, has raised $15 million in a Series A round from Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.
- HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar said Indian IT companies it will focus on turning profits rather than creating jobs. These comments come as IT stocks fall in India as fears grow that artificial intelligence will disrupt the IT services sector.
- Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said that industries such as IT services and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) can “almost disappear” within five years due to AI. He said Hindustan Times that 250 million young people in India should be selling AI-based products and services to the rest of the world.
- AMD is partnering with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop Rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s ‘Helios’ platform.
- Anthropic said it is opening its first office in India in the city of Bengaluru. The company said the country is the second largest user of Claude after the US
- Anthropic is partnering with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools like Claude Code to Indian businesses. Initially, both will develop artificial intelligence tools in the telecommunications sector with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence.
- Indian AI company Sarvam is teasing its upcoming smart glasses called Sarvam Kaze. The company has released several models in recent weeks, including a dubbing model, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model, and a vision model for optical character recognition (OCR).
- Indian conglomerate Adani said it has set aside $100 billion to build AI data centers that will use renewable energy in India by 2035. The company said this investment will lead to an additional $150 billion investment in areas such as server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, dominant cloud platforms and support industries.
- Voice AI company Cartesia is partnering with India-based orchestrator Blue Machines to develop voice solutions for businesses with local data residency.
- Cohere Labs launches a family of open-weighted multilingual models that support more than 70 languages. These models can be run on local devices. The company said it has also released region-specific models.
- OpenAI said it will open two new offices in India in Bangalore and Mumbai.
- OpenAI has also partnered with the Tata Group to deploy 100 megawatts of computing in India with the goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt.
- India’s Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the country wants to attract over $200 billion in investment for artificial intelligence infrastructure over the next two years.
- Indian coding startup vibe Emergent said it hit $100 in ARR and launched a mobile app.
- Indian AI startup Sarvam has released two new open source models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B.
- Sarvam also announced a partnership with Qualcomm, HMD and Bosch to develop its AI models in devices including smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops and smart glasses.
- Voice AI startup Gnani has released a zero-download voice cloning model called Vachana that supports 12 languages.
- BharatGen, a government-backed artificial intelligence consortium, has released a 17 billion parameter model called Param 2 that works in 22 languages.
- Steaming service JioHotstar said it will use ChatGPT to help discover content with chat search.
- Sarvam launches ChatGPT competitor called Indus which supports multiple Indian languages.
- OpenAI said 18-24-year-old users in India drive nearly 50% of India’s usage on ChatGPT.
- Indian technology company Tech Mahindra has released an 8 billion parameter Hindi-oriented model for educational use cases.
- UAE’s G42 has partnered with US-based chip maker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing in India through a supercomputer. Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Advanced Computing Development Center (C-DAC) are also part of the project.
- On the sidelines of the India AI Summit, Sam Altman said concerns about how much water AI uses are “totally bogus” but acknowledged the issue of water use when “we did evaporative cooling in data centers.”
- Interestingly, he also said that humans use a lot of energy as they grow and process the things around them. He believes the arguments surrounding ChatGPT’s power consumption are “unfair”.
“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a person,” Altman said. “It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time to become intelligent.”
- India said it above 88 countries and organizations signed the New Delhi Declaration on Artificial Intelligence for trying to use artificial intelligence for social and economic good. These countries included the US, China and Russia.
- India has joined the US-led Pax Silica consortium to create a smooth supply chain network of materials used to build artificial intelligence infrastructure. Other members include the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Qatar, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Australia.
