From Gen to Jan: The possible 'third path' for India

I believe, however, that India should not be looking at playing a catch-up game here, but follow a ‘third path’, one that India has demonstrated to the world in recent years: India should consider building GenAI as a digital public good (DPG). I call this JanAI or ‘GenAI for the people.’ (The term JanAI was coined by Sudhir Tiwari and me, ThoughtWorks India.)

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The world-beating success of the Indian Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is well-known. Riding on the India Stack, this ‘digitisation at population scale’ has led to 1.4 billion Indians with a digital biometric identity with Aadhaar, simplified payments at scale with UPI leading to almost half the world’s digital payments, the world’s largest vaccination campaign, and many other achievements.

Services built on top of this Stack have considerably eased health care, logistics, ecommerce, government subsidies and have led to inclusive societal growth across the country. Innumerable startups have leveraged the open APIs of the Stack to create innovative and at-scale services for citizens. The India Stack is growing global with countries like Singapore, France, UAE, and others signing up to it, and many others in the pipeline.

The true power of the Stack has been realised by offering it as a DPG (akin to clean air or defence or law-enforcement), so that it reaches every citizen; and making it open enables large companies and startups to build value and wealth on top of it. We believe that GenAI should be treated similarly in India. JanAI could be a set of LLMs built as another layer of the India Stack, where the key is that it will be offered as a public service. Thus, it will bridge the inevitable digital divide, and provide benefits for the entire population, much like Aadhaar and UPI have done.

This will also give India the opportunity to build out guardrails and safeguards around privacy, bias, and other AI ethical concerns, using Indian notions of collective and societal privacy and trust which are sometimes very different from the Western concept of individuality-oriented privacy. This is similar to Nandan Nilekani’s vision of AI as Adbhut Intelligence, where he says, “We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM... We are here to make a difference, and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people.”

We believe that this unique AI could happen through a tripartite partnership between a proactive government, our world-leading IT industry, and some leading technical institutions like the IITs. We already have governance mechanisms like UIDAI and ONDC, we need to create a similar one for JanAI. Indian companies could then ‘spin out’ their own specific fine-tuned LLMs; startups could leverage this through open APIs along with ChatGPT and others to build out innovative India-specific products; and millions of individual creators could use its awesome generative powers to build out content and creativity-led businesses. Above all, a billion-plus Indians will become AI literate; I believe that literacy will go beyond knowing language and arithmetic to how people can use AI tools in their daily lives.

In another DPG-led context, Nilekani said, “Wealth won’t trickle down, so we are raising the floor.” Let us raise the floor by combining the two biggest movements in digital technology—GenAI and DPG—into a uniquely Indian third way to create JanAI out of GenAI, and, once more, serve as a ‘GenAI for all’ model for the world.

The author is founder of AI&Beyond, which builds AI literacy in organisations, and the author of The Tech Whisperer