Weekend Warp

However improbable it sounds, AI seems to have been overshadowed by politics over the last week or two. Joe Biden provided the first spark with his disastrous debate performance, making people question the notion that humans were more intelligent than AI. The UK elections provided a spot of cheer, and dominated the airwaves, with AI relegated to a place it is not used to – the sidelines. So, here’s what happened in those sidelines then.

Sam Altman said the magic word 5, as he hinted at GPT 5 coming along soon. Earlier, his CTO Mira Murati had spoken of it having “PhD level intelligence”, underwhelming a lot of people who have actually done PhDs. Calling it “a significant leap forward”, Altman said that "A lot of the things that GPT-4 gets wrong, you know, can't do much in the way of reasoning, sometimes just sort of totally goes off the rails and makes a dumb mistake, like even a six-year-old would never make." Altman likened the current state of AI technology to the early days of the iPhone, suggesting that while today's models are useful, they are still in the nascent stages of their potential. He pointed out that current AI models, including GPT-5, are relatively small compared to what future advancements might bring. Hmm… does not seem that GPT5 would be very exciting, would it. I personally think GPT4o was the real deal.

Anyway, read more here

Continuing on the Altman theme, CP Gurnani and Tech Mahindra had an opportunity to cock a snook at him. When he was visiting India, he had advised that India should not make a local LLM, since it did not have the resources and the capability to do so. Famously, CP Gurnani, the then CEO of Tech Mahindra, had publicly taken up the challenge. He publicly went? on to announce last week, that Tech Mahindra’s LLM Indus was now ready, less than a year or so after Altman threw down the gauntlet. Gurnani revealed that Tech Mahindra was able to develop an Indian LLM for local languages and 37+ dialects in just 5 months, spending less than $5 million. He also said that India will develop its own 英伟达 like company in the next 5-7 years and would not need to be dependent on someone else – now that will be a tougher deal than building an LLM. Excited about the news, and looking forward to see how Indus performs – it has been greeted by excitement and scepticism in equal measure.

Read more here

Staying with India, the Global India AI Summit just concluded in New Delhi. There were a slew of announcements, none bigger than the formal launch of the India AI Mission and the promise to bring in 10000 GPUs to India. While it is still a question on how and where those GPUs will be housed and used, the IT Minister did provide some direction. Information Technology (IT) minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the main objective of IndiaAI is to bridge the gap between AI research and the real world to solve problems that people face on a daily basis. The government approach will be investing in public platforms that offer access to computer power and high-quality data sets. “A common set of technical and legal frameworks is also available here. Startups, entrepreneurs, academics, and people working on various applications in sectors such as agriculture, medicine, healthcare, and education can use this common platform to accelerate their efforts,” To me, the big announcement was how the India led GPAI of G20 was shaping up to be a regulatory body for AI in the Global South, and potentially globally (GPAI: India’s bid to make GPAI as AI regulator gets global support). I have been one of the advocates for global regulation of AI, as the technology is not limited to one country. The current geopolitical situation is ripe for a relatively neutral country like India to take the lead in shaping global regulation.

More news on the Global India AI Summit here

Image credits: Anuj Magazine

The space is certainly heating up....... at warp speed.