AI research organisation and tech company OpenAI seems to have some pretty large plans in store for India. The company, led by Sam Altman, recently appointed Rishi Jaitly, who has run policy and operations for both Google and Twitter in Asia, as OpenAI’s senior advisor and the company’s first employee in India, as per reports. Jaitly will help OpenAI gain insights into the complexities of India’s AI policies and regulations and facilitate conversations between the Indian Government and the tech org regarding these policies.
OpenAI has plans to set up a local team here in India. India’s AI ecosystem is rapidly growing and the Indian Government too announced that it wouldn’t be imposing strict regulations on AI development. IT Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar has asked for International collaboration to set up a workable framework on regulating AI with safety and trust to be upheld in high regard.
At the Global Technology Summit in New Delhi, hosted by Carnegie India and India’s external affairs ministry, Chandrasekhar said, “We certainly are focused on using AI in real-life use cases and our prime minister is absolutely a believer that technology can transform the lives of people, make governments deliver more, deliver faster, deliver better. And so AI is going to be used for us to build models and build capabilities that are aimed at real-life use cases.”
This is where Jaitly comes in.
The son of two physicians, Jaitly is, in fact, a history graduate who was born and brought up in New York and later Connecticut, in the US. The family has roots near Srinagar in Kashmir. But his parents were born and brought up in Kolkata, Nagpur, Mathura and Chennai. Jaitly’s maternal grandfather was standing next to Mahatma Gandhi when he was assassinated.
Jaitly went to Princeton University to study medicine but found himself more interested in history and eventually pursuing an education in the liberal arts at the Ivy League college; where, by the end of his Princeton time, he also ‘performed South Asian theatre, joined an Indian dance troupe and completed a senior thesis on the US’s South Asia immigration policy during the Cold War’.
In the book ‘The Fuzzy and The Techie: Why the liberal arts will rule the digital world’, author Scott Hartley writes about Jaitly: “Throughout college, he also embraced his newfound interest in service: he won his race for class vice president, was asked by New Jersey’s governor to become a state commissioner of higher education, and, after graduation, won a coveted spot as a trustee on Princeton University’s Board of Trustees. There he sat next to other trustees, one by the name of Eric Schmidt. By exploring his own passions, Jaitly had found a trapdoor to the very top of Google….”
“After Jaitly delivered an eloquent closing prayer at an autumn Board meeting in Princeton, Schmidt leaned over to him at the table. “We don’t need any more technologists at Google,” he whispered. “We need more people like you.” Google was most in need of communicators, and chameleons like Jaitly whom they could drop into any situation, and who could perform with zeal and autonomy. Schmidt convinced Jaitly to build on his early career at education non-profit College Summit and join Google in the office of the CEO; from there, Jaitly earned trust, and later the opportunity to help Google scale its presence in India.”
From 2006 to 2007 he was Aide to CEO and Policy Analyst at Google, where he supported the company’s international public policy advocacy and government affairs, led Google.org’s product partnerships with the United Nations (built “MDG Monitor” platform which allows citizens to monitor Millennium Development Goals), and assisted Google’s Schmidt in communications and special projects.
At Google India from 2007 to 2009, he led public-private partnerships, corporate philanthropy, public policy advocacy, and government affairs for Google and YouTube across India and South Asia.
He helped overturn Internet censorship in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; advocated for an open, accessible, and innovative web; mobilized India’s top political parties to use the Internet for the first time; led national Internet adoption/safety marketing campaigns; and led the development of Google’s first ever elections-transparency and citizen-empowerment product, and continued to support Google’s Chairman and CEO on communications and special projects.
Due to his Google India stint and time as Twitter’s first India hire in 2012, where he left in 2016 as vice president, Asia Pacific, Middle East & North Africa, Jaitly brings in a whole host of experience that could be very valuable for OpenAI.
As Twitter’s first person on ground in India and mainland Asia, he led the company’s expansion into the market and oversaw country operations, end-to-end. He also led the Twitter teams across Asia Pacific and the Middle East and drove strategic partnerships with the news, government, entertainment, sports, TV industries, and others in the mass/emerging media landscape.
Hartley wrote: “On any given day he’d jump between evangelizing Twitter to developers in Bengaluru’s start-up ecosystem to helping a Bollywood celebrity locked out of an account, to holding meetings with Indian Premier League cricket executives on their approach to social media to sitting down with police officers tracking ISIS. And during election season, he was even pulled into the bowels of national politics, and a controversy or two.”
Beginning in late 2016, Jaitly envisioned, architected and scaled as Founding CEO, Times Bridge, a venture capital business to help purposeful ideas travel more evenly around the world, and to/within India in particular. Times Bridge’s mission is to bring the world’s best ideas and technology to India. Its current investment portfolio includes Airbnb, Coursera, Girl Effect, Headspace, Houzz, Luminary, Malaria No More, MUBI, Smule, Stack Overflow, Uber, VICE and Wattpad. It is capitalized by Bennett Coleman & Company Ltd (BCCL) and the Times Group.
Jaitly advises a wide range of causes and companies around the world as Principal of Alchmy LLC. He serves at Virginia Tech, where he founded and led the Institute for Leadership in Technology, which offers rising stars in the technology landscape the US’s first executive degree in the humanities.
As an advocate of the humanities, he presently serves as a Trustee of the National Humanities Center, Virginia Humanities, Village Capital, PRX. At his alma mater, Princeton University, he also served as a Trustee nearly two decades ago and Chaired the Alumni Association’s Communications and Technology Committee. Jaitly has also co-founded a leadership social network of and for black men and boys, an online service platform and America’s first online micro-lending initiative.
But it’s Jaitly’s extensive experience across the US and India and his role in shaping the beginning of Google and Twitter in India and South Asia, which perhaps makes him the ideal candidate for OpenAI, which went from a relatively unknown research lab to the world’s most famous tech company within a year.
Sam Altman, founder and recently reinstated CEO of OpenAI, had an elaborate discussion with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June about the country’s evolving and growing tech landscape and how India will benefit from the potential use cases of AI. While OpenAI doesn’t currently have a physical presence in India, these events showcase the company’s interest in leveraging India’s AI potential and market.
Altman recently spoke to TIME about his November ousting, reinstatement, AI and its potential contribution to disinformation, technology’s massive future potential and more.
“It’s been extremely painful for me personally, but I just think it’s been great for OpenAI. We’ve never been more unified. As we get closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI), as the stakes increase here, the ability for the OpenAI team to operate in uncertainty and stressful times should be of interest to the world,” he said.
He added, “We have to make changes. We always said that we didn’t want AGI to be controlled by a small set of people, we wanted it to be democratized. And we clearly got that wrong. So I think if we don’t improve our governance structure, if we don’t improve the way we interact with the world, people shouldn’t trust OpenAI. But we’re very motivated to improve that.
Altman mentioned that AGI will be the most powerful piece of tech that humanity has yet invented. Specifically, when talking about democratizing access to information globally, AGI will play a pivotal role.