Soni says India needs to break away from the US and Chinese models for AI development, and focus on enhancing human labour rather than replacing it
The Bharat1.AI founder believes India is better placed to leverage AI because of its demographic advantage over the US and China
Current large language models (LLMs) are not yet truly “foundational” as, while they are strong in specific tasks, they lack the ability to generalise and generate deterministic outputs, claimed Soni
As the global race for artificial intelligence intensifies, how can India use this emerging technology to maximise the potential of its demographic dividend?
Bharat1.AI cofounder Umakant Soni aims to lead the way forward through the company’s push for a “humanity-centric” approach to AI development.
At the third edition of Inc42’s AI Summit, Soni delivered his keynote address on “Building Humanity-Centric AI In A World Of Autonomous Agents”, focusing on how India can enhance human capability with AI while ensuring a safe economic transition.
He identified two dominant models of AI development, the US model relying on capital deployed by Big Tech companies, and the Chinese state-controlled model focusing on solving national problems. According to him, these models are aimed at replacing human labour – a strategy that makes sense for aging populations like the US where 17% of the population is aged over 60.
On the other hand, India being a country with over 900 Mn people aged 15-64 has a demographic advantage for the next 37 years. Hence, following these foreign playbooks could lead to severe wealth concentration, massive financial drains, and job losses, warned Soni.
Before Bharat1, Soni was part of the team that founded ARTPARK, a non-profit company set up jointly with Indian Institute of Science to create deeptech startups in AI and robotics.
“We need to create our own model of using AI, where we can get to have this massively available demographic potential and multiplex it,” said the founder, who went on to describe the potential of human capabilities combined with AI.
He pointed out the unique capabilities of human brains that are beyond technology, namely the ability to juggle a diverse breadth of complex tasks from driving to child care to problem solving. “Each one of us is running a 20 Watt supercomputer with 86 Tn neurons,” he said.
“We are not able to mimic that with all these billions of dollars of investment. Now, if we build a model which is able to surround this neural compute and enhance our superpowers, that’s the model that we should go for,” he added.
Combining Human Brains With AI Agents
By contrast, current large language models (LLMs) are not yet truly “foundational” as, while they are strong in specific tasks, they lack the ability to generalise and generate deterministic outputs, claimed Soni. Hence, he proposed a solution of combining human brains and identities along with the power of AI agents.
“Imagine if I could combine the age of super coders with the faster digitization that India would undertake, we could leapfrog. Not only that, if you’re able to build a new kind of model with trusted devices, trusted agent browsers with DPI integration supported on the device, it would result in very safe, trustworthy AI and a very safe transition,” added Soni.
He went on to describe his vision of a future where AI researchers and founders have agentic digital twins anchored to their digitised human identity and work together along with physical AI in the form of robots and embodied systems.
This is the model that Bharat1.AI is aiming to build, Soni claimed, adding that the company is currently in Phase One of its plan. As part of this, it has set up a 5 Lakh sq ft AI Superpark in Bengaluru for startups, academic institutions like IITs and BITS, and large enterprises, with connectivity of up to 400 GBps to all AI clouds with sub-millisecond latency.
“Bharat1.AI aims to create the largest AI hacker house in the world through our invite-only exclusive community of founders, by aggregating over 1,000 startups in the next three years,” added Soni.
Founded earlier this year by Soni, Subhashish Banerjee, and Sireesh Kupendra, Bharat1.AI describes itself as a company building a ‘humanity-centric’ AI ecosystem.
Source: Inc42 - Startups
