The significance of India's role in AI diffusion took centre stage at the New Delhi summit
In November 2023, a few governments and technologists gathered at Bletchley Park to discuss artificial intelligence (AI), seeking to come to terms with the technology they were developing. The mood was sombre and fear was the dominant register.
This was the first of a series of AI Summits, the most recent of which was held in New Delhi last week. Unlike Bletchley Park, Bharat Mandapam was not only much larger and more crowded, the mood was also markedly more upbeat.
With over 500,000 visitors from 118 countries and over 3,250 speakers, the AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi was far and away the largest AI summit to date. But what distinguished this conference was not its size or spectacle, but a growing recognition that the real challenge is not building intelligence, but spreading it.Any event of this scale is bound to have its fair share of mishaps and the AI Impact Summit was no exception.
While many on social media and in the domestic press spent last week fixating on these fumbles—from a misbegotten robot dog to traffic jams and long walks ordinary citizens had to endure to get home—anyone who has been inside the halls of Bharat Mandapam will testify that the corridors were buzzing. In terms of tangible outcomes, 80 countries and international organizations adopted the ‘New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact,’ a document that underscored the urgent need to realize AI’s potential to drive economic transformation.
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