New Delhi, May 6 (IANS) India has the potential to give the US a further edge in the race for AI adoption, with American tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon already committing billions of dollars in investments to build AI hubs across India, according to an article in Arab News.

These investments are aimed to ensure that US-designed technology forms the backbone of the Global South’s largest economy. If the future of the digital world is built on US-Indian infrastructure, the world will remain open and secure. But if it is built on China’s proprietary technology stack, the global order will fracture, the article written by Ylli Bajraktari and Dhruva Jaishankar states.

Although the US maintains a decisive edge in frontier models and high-end compute, China has proven that its capacity for innovation is a force to be reckoned with. To counter this, the US needs the talent and dataset scaling that only India can provide, the article opines.

“India offers more than just a massive market. It provides population-scale datasets drawn from almost 1.5 billion people, making it a vital theater for testing AI in real-world environments — from rural agriculture to urban healthcare. Moreover, with an AI talent pool projected to exceed 1.25 million by 2027, India provides the intellectual heft and human capital required to sustain a high-tempo innovation cycle,” the article states.

Potential, however, is not the same as proficiency. While India’s talent pool is vast, much more must be done to match skills to specific AI tasks. Bridging this gap should be seen as a US imperative. Integrating Indian talent into US-led ecosystems is the only way for American firms to maintain their edge against a competitor that views technology as a tool of state control, rather than a means of individual empowerment, the article further states.

It presents a four-point plan to turn the current US-India momentum in AI into a permanent strategic advantage. It suggests that linking India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem with the technological tools and capital available in the US can create common solutions for an array of global challenges.

Second, the two countries can cooperate in constructing resilient infrastructure and supply chains. Their efforts should encompass not only critical minerals and semiconductors, but also undersea cables, open telecommunications networks and data centers.

Third, India and the US will need to collaborate on creating a seamless, high-skill ecosystem for talent. With rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the US and many other countries, this will require navigating potentially treacherous political territory.

Lastly, to enable all the above, India and the US must align their technological standards, intellectual property rights and cybersecurity policies far more than they do today. Translating shared values into common agendas is the only way to reduce bilateral friction and accelerate cooperation, the article observes.

--IANS

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