IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said India must develop sovereign capability in artificial intelligence (AI) and look at setting up a national AI computing centre, in line with the global trend of increased investments in computing infrastructure due to rapid technological advancements.
“We had a very good discussion with Rajeev Chandrasekhar (the Minister of State for IT and electronics). I am a firm believer that every country ought to have some sovereign capability on artificial intelligence, including large language models, and generative AI,” Krishna said in an interaction with journalists on August 28.
Sovereign AI
On why this is important, he said, “You might want to use it for purposes the rest of the world does not want to invest in, you want to use it for purposes that you may not want to expose to the rest of the world. That means you need computing infrastructure; you need data infrastructure. And you need a way for the government and for private companies to be able to leverage that in a way that is unique to India.”
He said that it is possible to do this with an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, which is within India’s capacity. “The people who tell you that you need $10 billion, I think they are outright hallucinating,” he said.
US and China are among the developed economies that have invested heavily in AI development.
“In many nascent technologies, you often need the government to step in first before others will follow. The government should set up a national AI computing centre, some pools of data can be shared- maybe agriculture, health,” Krishna said, adding that there is receptivity in the government that these things make sense for the country.
Krishna who was in India for the B20 summit, along with other global business leaders such as Microsoft’s Brad Smith, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen and FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam, said the summit was a proud moment for India, showcasing its ability to compete on the global stage.
“There is a lot of sheer excitement around Chandrayaan”, he said referring to India’s successful space mission last week, where it became the first country in the world to land a rover on the lunar South Pole.
IBM Bullish on India
Krishna said India is poised to ride the AI wave successfully, just like it previously gained from the BPO and the IT services wave.
“India is a great source of talent, India’s got a friendly government, the India- US relationships are on a high. So, I fully expect that our business in India is going to grow. I expect that our total investment in India will keep growing,” he said while he didn’t quantify the investment or the jobs that would be created going forward.
IBM and AI
IBM’s experiments and research with AI, go back a long way. In the 80s and the 90s, it developed a chess-playing system called Deep Blue, which defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, in what was considered a significant milestone in the history of AI. It also developed IBM Watson, a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, which famously competed on TV quiz show Jeopardy against its two all-time champions.
When asked about where IBM sees itself amidst the growing battle for AI dominance between Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and others, Krishna said, “I think Watson winning Jeopardy a decade ago woke everybody up to AI. With the advent of large language models, the cost of creating and deploying these models has come down. I feel pretty good about what we’ll do. We are not putting on any B2C model, we are not doing social media.”
IBM is focussed on the enterprise side, having recently unveiled IBM Watsonx, a new artificial intelligence and data platform that seeks to help companies use AI in their business.
Tech budgets
Amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Krishna said he is optimistic about global GDP growth and technology spending.
“I think it’s impossible to predict how much of the technology growth will be AI. But I’ll put it this way. If you’re not using AI for almost every task in it, you’re going to be disadvantaged,” Krishna said.
AI’s impact on jobs
Krishna has previously spoken about the potential of AI to drive productivity, as it can take on low-level cognitive tasks and perform them. He’s also been vocal about the impact of generative AI on jobs, with white-collar, back-office work being the first set of roles that will get impacted.
IBM said in May that it plans to pause hiring for roles as it expects that as many as 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI, with 30% of non-customer-facing roles replaced by AI and automation over the next 5 years. IBM is also using AI to perform 90% of mundane HR tasks such as promotion and assessment of people.
This also comes at a time when more than half the world has decreasing working-age people and that jobs are hard to fill those places. India, however, stands in stark contrast, as it is home to more than 600 million people aged between 18 and 35, with roughly 65% under the age of 65.
According to Nasscom’s State of Data Science and AI Skills report, India has 16 percent of the world’s AI talent pool. India also has one of the largest annual STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduate supply, with 2.25 million graduates preparing to enter the workforce every year.
Krishna said that he would separate AI skills into two buckets. “There are people who have to actually invent artificial intelligence, that kind of skill will take maybe not 10, but at least five years to go develop. But the vast majority is deployment of AI, not inventing AI. If you want to deploy AI, my assertion is, based on watching our own teams, three months of work is needed to train people to deploy AI.”
AI investments
IBM joined companies such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Salesforce, to invest $235 million in open-source AI software development startup Hugging Face, in what was its Series D round of funding. According to media reports, the round valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion, which is 100 times its annualised revenue.
Krishna did his engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, before moving to the US for his PhD. He is an IBM lifer, having joined the firm in 1990, and going on to become the CEO in 2020, joining a growing list of global tech CEOs of Indian origin.