Way back in April 2022, India’s first Generative Ai platform was launched by the iIT Alumni Council. A good two years after the IiT Alumni Council awarded its first distinguished fellow award to a Professor of AI (Prof Jyoti Joglekar) who had been teaching ai for twenty years. And this was a good thirty years after the Convenor of the IITac ai knowledge platform Swami Suryanil 🙏🏻 did his PhD in Ai. Here is the coverage in both US and Indian media:
In 2020, ai was esoteric. It wasn’t understood. It’s correlation with livelihoods was at best perfunctory. In fact, I recall none other than an IIT director wondering why we would kick off the largest fellowship program with ai. But there were others who got it immediately. Such as Prof Sarit Das at IIT Ropar. He saw potential for ai in agriculture and Punjab:
This was in 2020.
And we think we were late to join the party. A good ten years later than we should have been. But what we did do is to stir the pot. To highlight an opportunity. To identify a threat.
We didn’t look upon it as technology. We looked upon it as an inflection that required a change in the civilisational paradigm. And that is how the Megaspheres Orientation was launched. Ai is not a technological change.
It demands a new civilisational paradigm.
A Megaspheres orientation
A holistic view of all the spheres of our existence. Not a compartmentalised approach like western medicine.
The approach has paid off and this year we will see a host of innovations – all ai first, all ai native, all ai disruptive.
This is not a replica of American thought. It is not a replica of the replica China built of American foresight.
It is a new way of looking at intelligence. And at intuition. Nothing like this has ever been done to date. Resulting in new materials like carbon based smartphone batteries. And a new data centre architecture that looks at water free cooling and the lowest cost per token for ai inference. It needs neither Cuda nor Nvidia
Because it starts where no one else did. It is a fifteen year journey. And 15.8.26 marks the midpoint of that journey.
The reverberations will be global. As Harish Mehta, cofounder of nasscom and author of the IITac supporter Maverick Effect put it:
Africa, the world’s youngest continent, home to 1.5 billion people, needs the world’s biggest jobs mission. Africa can build on India’s experience to create millions of sustainable jobs and shape its own prosperous future. Now with ai.