‘Govts should access the best tech, not reinvent the wheel’

livemint.com:

SEATTLE, WA : In May, Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Microsoft-backed OpenAI who was fired on Friday, had stirred a hornet’s nest, commenting on India’s attempt to develop a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool like ChatGPT, terming it “hopeless", while responding to a question by Rajan Anandan, the managing director of Peak XV Partners, and a former head of Google India. Altman later clarified that his response was “…really taken out of context! (and that the)...question was about competing with us with $10 million (as opposed to $100 million), which I do think is not going to work..." That said, India does not have a semiconductor fab to build chips required to power a large language model (LLM) or LLM-powered chatbot.

LLMs typically require below 10 nanometre (nm) graphic processing units (GPUs), while India plans to build a 40 nm semiconductor fab, implying that it will have to buy graphics processing units (GPUs) and use cloud services to bear the costs of building an LLM. Cut to 16 November, a day before Altman was asked to leave OpenAI, Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, told a select group of journalists at a roundtable in his Redmond office, that he had thought “very, very deeply about" the instances of countries aspiring to build their own LLMs.

Acknowledging that India would have “legitimate reasons why they want to do things that are important", he said governments would need to strike a balance between national and economic interests, which “is definitely going to be key". In fact, to drive home his point, Nadella cited a study by an economics professor of Dartmouth College, Diego Comin, who concluded that countries seeking to take advantage of “real