🚨 Nandan Nilekani says that India’s path in AI (artificial intelligence) is different.
Indian startups have to focus on applications and use cases rather than building the biggest large language models (LLMs) like Silicon Valley startups.
“Let those people with capital, and who have better chips do that,” he said.
“Our advantage currently lies not in compute, cloud, or chips. 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐑𝐬 100 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐬 1……𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈. 𝐖𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 1 𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.”
"Winners in AI in India will be those who meet customers where they are," Nilekani said at an event by
@PeoplePlusAI earlier this week. These are some comments that I found interesting from his chat.
Startups and companies should leverage AI’s capabilities to personalize products at scale, which has not been possible earlier, according to Nilekani.
“We are moving to a world where instead of you adjusting to the technology, the technology will adjust to you. It will adjust to you as a person, adjust to your skills, adjust your talents, adjust, your capabilities, adjust your language, and your skills……what we have found is whenever we make it easier for technology to adjust to you then our usage goes up,” he said.
Nilekani mentioned that companies should leverage the combination of digital public infrastructure (DPI) and AI. DPI is the combination of Aadhaar, UPI, Account Aggregator (AA), and ONDC open-source software.
This includes examples like leveraging local language capabilities of AI platforms like Bhashini and Sarvam to deliver personalized financial services products or offers, by understanding customer's banking profiles through AA.
There was a demo by Pine Labs/Setu of a new chat-based personal finance product.
“We have a unique infrastructure in India where we are building digital public infrastructure for AI. We are building a set of digital public goods for AI. We are building on top of an existing DPI to power AI and therefore accelerating the adoption of AI in India,” said Nilekani.
“And that's what this is a really the unique way that India is doing in AI which is what gives us confidence that we can move very rapidly in this space. Now, we talk about unbundling, but now with AI, we have a chance to bundle again. It was James Clarke of Netscape who said that we spend half our lives unbundling and then the next half re-bundling.”
“This means that all these AI Tools now allow you to put things back together in a very effective way to get the full impact of the solutions. Because for the first time, we can now personalize at scale.”