'It's actually in the first!' Ashwini Vaishnaw's strong take on IMF chief calling India 'second-tier AI power' — here's why

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday rejected the IMF’s (International Monetary Fund) categorisation of India as a “second-tier AI power”,questioning the basis of the assessment and asserting that India belongs to the "first" group of countries in artificial intelligence.

Responding to the comments by IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva, Vaishnaw said, "I don't know what the IMF criteria has been, but Stanford places India as third in terms of AI penetration, in terms of AI preparedness, and in terms of AI talent." He further added that the country is focused on spreading the use of AI widely rather than concentrating only on scale.




“So our focus is very much on making sure that AI diffusion happens in a very big way," he said, adding, "all the three, actually on AI talent it is number two, so I don't think your classification in the second bouquet is right. It's actually in the first.”

Elaborating his stance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the minister said that AI capability should be judged across five layers of architecture, application, model, chip, infrastructure and energy, and said India is active across all of them.

“Actually, clearly in the first group, and the reason for that is there are five layers in the AI architecture. The application layer, the model layer, the chip layer, the infra layer, and the energy layer. We are working on all the five layers, making very good progress in all the five layers,” Vaishnaw said.

He said India’s biggest opportunity lies in the application layer, where AI can be used to deliver services to enterprises and generate economic returns.

“On the application layer, we will probably be the biggest supplier of services to the world, go to an enterprise, understand the business of enterprise, understand the working of that enterprise, and provide that service using AI applications. That's going to be the biggest factor of success or successful deployment of AI, because that's where ROI comes from,” he said.

Vaishnaw also said that building extremely large AI models alone does not give countries real strength.

“ROI doesn't come from creating a very large model. Ninety-five percent of the work can happen with models which are 20 billion or 50 billion parameters. We are creating a bouquet of such models. We already have. We already have a bouquet of such models, which are now being deployed in multiple sectors to increase the productivity, to increase the efficiency, to increase the effective use of technology,” he said.

Earlier in Davos, the IT minister also said that India is deeply engaging with all major economies across all fronts.

The 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum is being held from January 19 to 23, in Davos-Klosters, bringing together nearly 3,000 participants from more than 130 countries. The event has drawn a record presence of world leaders, chief executives, innovators and policymakers, and is being held under the theme “A Spirit of Dialogue.”