India Must Embrace Technoglobalism
In the year 2023 could be a turning point in humanity's pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI). This year, the public's attention is focused on ChatGPT and other popular AI products such as Google Bard. These generative AI initiatives based on large-scale linguistic models (LLMs) are important because they may pave the way for more general AI that is indistinguishable from human intelligence. These developments illustrate why India is embracing technoglobalism and demonstrate the enduring benefits of promoting cross-border and sectoral flows of science and technology. 
First, global access to science and research is central to AI innovation. Generative AI analyzes the data and learns from data sets that train neural networks that help machines learn tasks. Computational advantages gained through hardware improvements allow products like ChatGPT to learn quickly from large data sets. But the brute force of hardware is unaffordable without advanced research and development of basic neural network architectures. These architectures are now available worldwide in open source science and research.
The role of open science is best exemplified by the events of 2017, when scientists at Google Brain and Google Research unveiled a new network architecture called Transformer that supports models like ChatGPT. The Transformer AI model is a neural network that learns context and can track meaningful relationships in sequential data, reducing the time it takes to find answers to questions.
Recognizing the benefits of knowledge sharing, Google researchers have made their work open source, a hallmark of technoglobalism, without which generative AI might not be where it is today. Similarly, in February, Meta released a model called LLMA, or Meta-AI for Large Languages, to help researchers learn large language models without massive computing infrastructure.
Today, data from the public Internet is used to train generative artificial intelligence models. Thus, researchers and developers from different parts of the world are on a level playing field when it comes to data. They don't need access to their own data sets to run powerful AI models, except for those that need to be trained for very specific applications. For example: Common Crawl is a repository of raw web page data, extracted metadata and text snippets since 2008. This is an important contribution to the development of ChatGPT.
Finally, managing the widespread adoption and use of technologies such as ChatGPT requires international cooperation. National responses are insufficient. For example, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has warned us about the dangers of misuse of this technology, including the automated creation and proliferation of information on a global scale. In the year In 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a "global code of conduct promoting the integrity of public data" to "better manage and manage our digital commons as a global public good." Similar international multi-stakeholder efforts are underway to promote responsible AI development. For example, the Global AI Partnership is an international initiative to support the universal development of AI. It is an alliance of 25 countries, of which India is a founding member and the current president.
India benefited greatly from the free movement of people and ideas during the early Information Technology (IT) boom and should be open to following the age of AI. Our IT industry is one of the largest in the world because our international entrepreneurs have taken their first steps abroad. Thus, IT accounts for half of the total foreign exchange remittances to India.
Similarly, early adoption of AI will help the domestic IT industry reduce its reliance on labor outsourcing as a core business proposition. Rather, it involves creating and deploying scalable and flexible software products. The expansion of 1,500 Global Capability Centers across the country – operations centers that provide IT support to boost productivity and digital transformation – shows that India is well positioned to help automate the world with tools like AI. An open policy stance that encourages cross-border digital trade and innovation is the right way to achieve this goal.
Vivan Sharan is a partner at Coan Consulting Group.
The opinions expressed are personal.
