The AI Action Summit will be held in Paris from February 10 to 11. India is a co-chair and prime minister Narendra Modi will attend it. India and France aim to collaborate on AI development across issues related to infrastructure, governance, and making the technology sustainable among other issues.
The January 25 discussion was an agenda-setting meeting where issues related to AI sovereignty and native LLMs were discussed. The French side discussed how AI systems require “cross-pollination”, that is, relying on expertise in other sectors, especially in sectors such as health and defence.
Since then, India has already announced that the government will financially support Indian companies in developing foundation models.
When it comes to AI governance, the two sides discussed how open technical solutions could be encouraged to prevent fragmentation, and existing efforts around common terminologies and risk inventories should be harmonised.
The two countries also discussed how they could collaborate on building AI infrastructure. This could result in an announcement at the Summit in Paris and finer details are currently being ironed out between the two governments.
The aim is to improve access to advanced compute capacity, a field where India’s AI Mission has made significant strides by offering 40 per cent subsidy on discounted GPU prices to start-ups, academics, researchers and students.
India and France are also considering whether an AI incident database is required to bring transparency, accountability and safety in AI systems.
A Meity-appointed subcommittee has recommended that the Indian government should adopt a whole of government approach to AI governance wherein MeitY should house a technical advisory body. It has already recommended that the AI governance group should build an AI incident database to understand the “actual incidence of AI-related risks in India”. The government has released this report for public comments until February 27.
There was also discussion about how AI needs to be both sustainable and future-proof. Risks of market concentration due to dominance by a handful of companies were also discussed.
The January 25 meeting was co-chaired by Abhishek Singh, Meity additional secretary and IndiaAI Mission CEO, and Marc Lamy, the consul general of France in Bangalore. It was attended by officials from MEA, PSA’s office, Nasscom, iSPIRT and the French Ministry Europe and Foreign Affairs.
