Opinion
The Paris AI Action Summit could help India raise its game in this vital field
Summary
- Paris AI Summit: This global gathering aims to have artificial intelligence serve the common good. Should India and France join hands, it would not only benefit us both, it may also help stop the US-China rivalry from stealing the AI race
Keeping up the momentum of the 2023 Bletchley Park and 2024 Seoul AI Safety talks, global leaders have gathered at this year’s AI Action Summit in Paris to forge a consensus on the regulation and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) for the common good. The agenda of this huddle focuses on public-service AI, the future of work, innovation and culture, trust in AI and global governance.
India, co-chairing talks with France, aims to bolster its position in the global AI ecosystem and collaborate with EU nations on issues such as climate change and energy use. However, we face a major hurdle in recent US curbs on the export of advanced chips to India, which clouds our ambition to compete with today’s AI leaders: the US, China and the UK. Can a handshake with France work to India’s advantage?
Also Read: Paris AI Summit: Why France as an AI ally can help India match US, China
Both countries have been developing national AI strategies since 2018. France has invested about €2.5 billion in setting up an AI ecosystem and is home to over 1,000 AI startups, including 16 unicorns (like Mistral AI).
French efforts are backed by four interdisciplinary AI institutes that got public and private research to work together. Since 2019, the Jean Zay supercomputer has supported more than 1,200 academic and industrial projects. Tech majors such as OpenAI, Alphabet, DeepMind, IBM, Meta, SAP, Uber and TCS have set up or expanded AI labs in France. Its leadership has sought to mobilize private investments of €109 billion in AI over the years ahead—less than America’s $500 billion Stargate project, but a big signal.
France also plans to dedicate a gigawatt of nuclear power to a mega AI facility. India, too, has taken strides. The government has invested over $1 billion in the IndiaAI Mission. We now have four chip projects underway, valued at over ₹1.5 trillion and aimed at reducing our reliance on imports for crucial hardware inputs. Plus, India has selected 10 firms to supply 18,693 GPUs for the creation of essential machine learning tools.
Add to this a skilled and cost-effective talent pool of software developers and engineers, a reason why we host around 2,000 global capability centres that are engaged in advanced R&D for multinationals.
Also Read: Nilesh Jasani: Snap out of the DeepSeek delusion and invest big in basic research
Yet, both India and France trail the US and China on AI.
Play catch-up with US and China
Stanford’s Global AI Vibrancy Rankings 2023 placed India fourth and France sixth. The US has invested nearly $250 billion in 4,643 companies since 2013, compared to China’s $95 billion in 1,337 startups, with India having put $8 billion into 296. The US leads the arena, be it top-end research, model development or startup funding.
Notably, China attracted $67.2 billion in AI-related private investment in 2023—surpassing the US’s $7.8 billion—and has produced more machine learning models (61 versus 15), while leading in AI-related patents. Moreover, Chinese models like DeepSeek’s R1 and Kimi k1.5 are making Silicon Valley sweat with their energy efficiency and open-source frameworks.
India’s planned semiconductor fabs will not churn out chips used at the cutting edge of AI competitiveness. But the IndiaAI Mission should mean more computing power, improved data quality for language models, sharper skill-sets, more startup funding and a wave of new apps, apart from a framework for AI governance.
Also Read: AI chips: India must get its basics right to meet this great catch-up challenge
AI ties with France could catalyse both our efforts in a field too important to let the world’s two geopolitical arch-rivals dominate. AI, ultimately, must enrich our lives, not imperil us.
