The world’s biggest AI experiment is happening in India: Will we make the most of it?

Usually, India doesn’t feature in these conversations. It isn’t going to be a chipmaking superpower any time soon. And, although a couple of big data-centre projects have been announced, high energy costs and land scarcity limit its ambitions.

Yet, India may be the biggest, safest bet in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Not because it will build AI models, but because it will use them.

The world’s large language model (LLM) players already suspect this. In recent months, three companies have rolled out free access to their paid tiers exclusively in India. OpenAI’s lightweight ChatGPT Go plan will be available at no cost to Indians for a year; Alphabet’s Gemini Pro will be provided to every single one of Reliance Jio’s 505 million subscribers for 18 months; and Perplexity will offer its Pro version to Bharti Airtel’s 350 million users.

That two of the three are going with Indian telecom providers is partly to build scale. Nobody gives you numbers like India does. And young Indians are particularly ferocious adopters of technology.

We are on the cusp of a planetary-scale social experiment: What happens when you push free, unlimited, cutting-edge AI onto a billion-plus peoples’ phones? Indian officials know the answer they’re hoping for. This might be how India breaks out of its low-skill, low-productivity trap. Growth numbers look impressive, but they’re driven by a few high-output sectors; a majority of people work for themselves or informal enterprises, and according to the International Labour Organization, are only half as productive as the average.

Last month, Niti Aayog argued in an AI-focused report that it could triple the productivity of India’s informal workers in the next decade, taking it from $5 an hour to $15 an hour. The think-tank’s officials said their calculations showed widespread adoption would add between $500 billion and $600 billion to India’s output by 2035.

New Delhi is an upbeat city and this figure is almost certainly exaggerated by flattering assumptions. The brutal fact is that every other attempt to give India’s hundreds of millions of young people the skills they need to compete has failed. And, as my colleague Andy Mukherjee has argued, entry-level white-collar jobs are as much at risk in India as they are anywhere else.

But official optimism about this AI-led technological transformation isn’t entirely unfounded. Indian youth are not just enthusiastic about tech, they are unusually verbal users. The reason why almost every explainer on YouTube is made by and for Indians is because many of us search for answers on video sites first. This sort of curiosity is almost designed for an era defined by language models that let you talk your way to competence.

The one thing that we know about LLMs is that they seem to flatten the skill curve. Someone who has never coded a line of Python can suddenly create halfway-decent websites, and her friend without any experience of this country’s Byzantine regulatory environment can suddenly navigate opaque government forms.

Some of this is already visible online. Look at X, for example. ChatGPT’s characteristic syntax is identifiable in tens of thousands of blue-tick accounts from India. Those posts are getting the engagement they crave, nevertheless. It may be irritating, but it’s working.

A similar dynamic will play out in the real world. Indians will break down instructions they earlier couldn’t understand. They will teach themselves new systems step by step, transcending their flawed educational and skilling system. Speakers of Hindi or Marathi will see their horizons expand now that they’re able to navigate different languages in a multilingual world. They will be able to provide services that cross deep cultural divides.

What OpenAI and others seem to have realized is that there’s more than one way for a country to provide AI infrastructure. Data centres, power plants, semiconductor fabs—sure. But the last and most essential ingredient is people. And people, India has. That’s why the biggest AI play in the world might be India itself—not as a chipmaker or algorithm owner, but as everything else. Not in any one sector, but in all of them.

If LLMs lower the barrier to achieving competence and work as enablers for the unskilled and disconnected, then India’s hundreds of millions of underperforming workers become the world’s most consequential growth story. Perhaps it’s time to let LLMs try achieving what the Indian government couldn’t. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.