India Has No Plans to Bring Any Law for Regulating AI Growth in the Country

The government is neither considering to bring any law nor has any plans to regulate the growth of artificial intelligence in the country, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.

IT and Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in a written submission to the Lok Sabha said there are ethical concerns and risks around artificial intelligence, and the government agencies have started making efforts to standardise responsible AI and promote the adoption of the best practices.

“NITI Aayog has published a series of papers on the subject of Responsible AI for All. However, the government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country,” Vaishnaw said.

In a reply to a separate question on ChatGPT technology, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said it is a Large Language Model (LLM) launched by OpenAI.

“While it has made significant strides, there are still many challenges with these types of models,” Chandrasekhar said.

In response to a question on the step that the government is taking to regulate the growth of AI in the country, Vaishnaw said that the government is harnessing the potential of AI to provide personalised and interactive citizen-centric services through digital public platforms.

“However, AI has ethical concerns and risks due to issues such as bias and discrimination in decision-making, privacy violations, lack of transparency in AI systems, and questions about responsibility for harm caused by it. These concerns have been highlighted in the National Strategy for AI (NSAI) released in June 2018,” Vaishnaw said.

The minister shared that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), along with CDAC, has also initiated a proof-of-concept project on AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform) for providing a common computing platform for AI research and knowledge assimilation.

The AI computing infrastructure will be used by all technology innovation hubs, research labs, scientific communities, and industry and startup institutions with National Knowledge Network.

“The PoC for AIRAWAT is developed with 200 petaflops Mix Precision AI Machine, which will be scalable to a peak compute of One AI Exaflop,” the minister said.

He said that National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up a Centre of Excellence in AI, which is involved in facilitating AI as a service through on Meghraj cloud with 7 AI PFlops (petaflops) super compute facilities created at Delhi and 5 AI PFlop in Kolkata.