On the ground at India’s AI Impact Summit – part 2

When ‘People, progress and planet” morphed into, ‘Power, power and Power'

A very different second half to the Indian AI Impact Summit saw a shift not only in the audience, but in tone and participation.

The arrival of world leaders - 15 Heads of State and 65 Ministers - brought the city to a standstill. “People, Progress and Planet” morphed into “Power, Power, Power”. Traffic chaos ensued every time a VIP was moved, with closed roads gridlocking the city. The event was graced with a higher leadership turnout than expected, but both Bill Gates and Jensen Huang withdrew at the last minute.

The “Inauguration Day” was reduced from two days to one, and its 7,000 attendees were very different to the 500 or so in Paris. The lines of women entering the summit were tiny, but remained slow as security staff debated handing over expensive cosmetics prohibited from the venue without prior notice. Gone but not forgotten…

The short notice of pass collection at MeiTY (the Digital Ministry)’s offices across town meant at least one CEO I know didn’t collect their pass or attend at all. Attendees were seated by 7.30am for PM Modi’s 9.30am arrival. The morning sessions did not disappoint.

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw opened, saying that India will cover all five layers of the stack. He also talked about sovereignty - India signed the US Pax Silica during the Summit.

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was a forceful voice, saying, “The future of AI cannot be left to a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires.” He also reminded us of a theme across the wider event, that AI must be "accessible to everyone."

The front row of billionaires may have been slightly uncomfortable during Guterres’ speech, but he was a lone voice during the day. Having broadened the overall group ten-fold, somehow the voices heard at Leaders’ Day were narrowed. Only Big Tech CEOs and world leaders were on stage; neither civil society or the open source community had any voice at all.

But even the CEOs and world leaders who spoke after the Inauguration with PM Modi weren’t widely heard, as many people left the campus immediately following the opening. Sam Altman and others were left speaking to rooms at 25% capacity. Of the 100 CEOs being celebrated across the Summit, only 16 were able to join the Leaders’ Roundtable.

Other keynote speakers included some of those billionaires: Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI delivered their normal scaremongering and confusion over whether they know something we don’t know or whether they are driving regulatory capture.

Altman was a lone voice in the day in criticising open source in AI, whilst the US Ambassador, UK AI Minister, French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Modi all recognised the need for open source through the Summit.

I was honoured to speak with UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan at the UK High Commission as he launched an OpenUK video where he endorsed open source at an event for 1,200.

President Macron gave a resounding support speech, in charismatic style, recognising India’s achievement in rolling out its Unified Payments Interface - a digital payment platform with 20 billion transactions a year - and digital identity for 1.4 billion people.

Macron also referenced a shift in geopolitics, saying, “There is a path for innovation and strategic autonomy,” and exploring the differences in approach:

“India made a deliberate choice in SML - small language models - to run on a phone. For India this is granular and smart, and reflected in the announcements this week. France took a different path - Mistral is now worth $12 billion - and has built LLMs, sovereign and scaled. Both have chosen different but right paths, independent of but co-operating with the US.”

These SLMs were a key launch at the Summit, in a fanfare of open source. But there have been comments that Sarvam AI is open washing; the licensing is far from open source, but a straightforward proprietary research non-commercial licencewith a promise to shift to “open weights next week”. This has not yet been done, and neither GitHub or HuggingFace has a community of scale.

Prime Minister Modi was fortunate to be on home turf, as President Macron was a very hard act to follow. Modi delivered his speech in Hindi, the relevance of which to sovereignty was not lost.

Recognising the need for open source as a shift from a technical decision to enabling leadership, power and influence in AI, there must be a shift for India and other middle nations to truly reap the value of open source. It’s not a spell where the magic words “open source” make this happen. The magic is in understanding open source's influence through adoption, requiring true open source licenses complying with the Open Source Definition.

Unfortunately, a lack of understanding was evident across the entire week of the summit. Whether accidental or intentional, open washing was rife and misinformed recommendations were accepted at a senior level. Use of terminology like “digital public good” and “civic tech” to avoid meeting the standards of open source further confused this.

Similar has been written about Sam Altman’s speech, which called out the lack of political understanding, meaning serious questions in AI are not being appropriately answered.

Modi ended his speech with the 16 key CEOs who also attended the CEO roundtable on stage. The now infamous hand punch from Sam and Dario was actually more entertaining to watch, with Dario’s hand firmly by his side.

The New Delhi Summit Declaration was delayed in its signing, extending the Summit to the 21st. Rumour has it that the US would not sign up while the document contained the word “inclusion.” A very neutral statement with mostly optional commitments, it does reference open source and common tools. The open source ‘tools not rules’ approach to AI governance continues.

Notably, in the end, the Declaration won support from both the US and UK, who did not sign up after Paris, and from China, despite not attending the Summit during their New Year period.

Switzerland will be the home of next year’s Summit. With a law requiring code benefiting from public money to be open source already in place in Switzerland, AI openness will be high up the agenda.

From Bletchley Park - where the phrase “open source” was said twice in total - to Paris’s public good and India’s Access for All approaches, can Switzerland step in to deliver the deep understanding and structure necessary?

Yann LeCun, speaking at the open source AI Alliance, certainly indicated the Swiss have the potential to meet that need next year.