Can India become a Global AI leader?

Unfortunately No.

While India's contribution to AI papers at top AI conferences (including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, EMNLP etc.) has remained flat over the last 10 years, China's contribution to the AI field, on the other hand, has dramatically increased and caught up with the USA during the same time period (Mahajan, Bhasin & Aggarwal, 2024).

This period in the field of AI was marked by numerous innovations in Deep Learning for images, text, audio; Transfer Learning, Synthetic Data, Transformers to name a few. We witnessed the emergence of groundbreaking models such as BERT, GPT-1/2/3, Stable Diffusion etc., which eventually led to the development of ChatGPT and the advent of the current era of LLMs and GenerativeAI.

India has missed the boat during this period and failed to proactively increase investment in R&D, infrastructure and capacity building for AI (our R&D budget is only ~0.65% of GDP vs. ~2.4% for China and ~3.5% for USA) as well as retain home-grown talent.

There is no straightforward solution to India's AI R&D challenges. While are early signs of progress (e.g. AI4Bhārat, IndiaAI, BHASHINI), in order to truly turn the page and compete at the top of the global AI hierarchy, we need to execute robust AI investment, innovation and implementation strategies. (More to come on this topic)