'No regulations for Artificial Intelligence in India': IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

While many top leaders in the tech industry including Elon Musk, Zoho chief Sridhar Vembu and more have raised concerns and called for an immediate need for regulations for Artificial Intelligence (AI), IT and Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has informed the parliament that they are not planning to regulate the growth or set any laws for AI in the country.

The minister recently told parliament in a written submission, “The government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country”. Vaishnaw acknowledged that there are ethical concerns and risks around AI and the government has already started making efforts to standardize responsible AI and even promote the adoption of the best practices.

In a statement, Vaishanaw said, “NITI Aayog has published a series of papers on the subject of Responsible AI for All. However, the government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country."

In a separate question regarding OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that it is a Large Language Model (LLM) launched by OpenAI. He further stated, “While it has made significant strides, there are still many challenges with these types of models.”

When asked about the steps that the government is taking to regulate AI, Vaishnaw revealed that they are planning to harness the potential of AI to offer personalized and interactive citizen-centric services through digital public platforms.

He further spoke about the concerns associated with AI. “AI has ethical concerns and risks due to issues such as bias and discrimination in decision-making, privacy violations, lack of transparency in AI systems, and questions about responsibility for harm caused by it. These concerns have been highlighted in the National Strategy for AI (NSAI) released in June 2018," Vaishnaw said.

Vaishnaw revealed that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity), along with CDAC is currently working on a proof-of-concept project on AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform) that will provide a common computing platform for AI research and knowledge assimilation.

Additionally, he announced that this AI computing infrastructure will be used across technology innovation hubs, research labs, scientific communities, and industry and startup institutions with National Knowledge Network.

He stated, “The PoC for AIRAWAT is developed with 200 petaflops Mix Precision AI Machine, which will be scalable to a peak compute of One AI Exaflop.” He added that National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up a Centre of Excellence in AI, that will offer AI as a service through on Meghraj cloud with 7 AI PFlops (petaflops) super compute facilities created at Delhi and a 5 AI PFlop facility in Kolkata.

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