Ritu Jha (reporting from San Jose, California)–
Global Indian Technology Professionals Association (Gitpro) World 2023, the eighth annual daylong conference on technology and entrepreneurship, and the first one after the pandemic, drew accomplished speakers from startups to large enterprises and tech students who were keen to learn about emerging technology.
Held June 17 at San Jose State University Student Center in San Jose, California, Gitpro founder Khanderao Kand, said the event saw 33 speakers, three different tracks, including 11 entrepreneurs, 3 Venture Capitalists, and six architects and AI experts.
He told indica that the focus was on bringing emerging and trending technologies to tech professionals to progress in their career and startup in these turbulent times.
“As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is most disruptive innovation of today, we focused on it and its applications,” Kand said. “We also had a startup bootcamp covering topics from successful entrepreneurs and VCs covering complete lifecycle as ideation, funding, lean startups methodology and growth hacking.”
India’s minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, urged prospective investors to invest in India, while many other speakers spoke on AI.
Serial entrepreneur Muddu Sudhakar, CEO and co-founder of Aisera, the world’s first generative AI-driven service experience platform for automated enterprise, believes that AI will create more jobs, not make them redundant.
“Companies like Wipro, and Infosys should train their employees to write workflows. AI will act as the engine to ask a question or understand what you are saying. But to do the job or request, I still need workflows. So, if I am the CEO of Wipro or Infosys, I will equip my employees to write AI workflows. To do that, I need hundreds and thousands of jobs,” Sudhakar told indica.
Does India have the requisite skills? “Yes, India has the skill, the manpower, and the education system. Now, the will of the leaders is needed to invest in AI in the right areas. Like how we invested in the cloud, now we have to invest in AI and go all in.”
Sudhakar had only one strong message for Indian companies — Train Your Employees.
“My job as an entrepreneur is to create technology and I rely on the politicians to put the safety net. Give me the law of the land and we will operate within that framework. AI regulation is needed for the safety, protection, trust, and security of all parties concerned,” Sudhakar said.
He added, “AI is going through a groundswell and it’s going to take another 10-20 years before it achieves its full potential. It’ll create more CPUs and neural processing units (NPUs). Then it’ll be used at the semiconductor level, infrastructure level, application level, and services level. There’ll be nuclear apps too. Apps like TikTok and Telegram will also be formed on AI. We are at the very early beginnings of AI. Nobody knows how AI will evolve. My view is, let’s make sure that we invest correctly.”
Sanjit Dang, chairman, and co-founder of U First Capital, spoke about AI, but he focused more on the Large Language Model market. “The LLM market, which is basically what GPT is, has a high entry cost. It costs around $10 billion to build through LLM,” Dang said while talking to indica.
Dang explained: “Because you have to have so many computers, so many servers, you have to put all of that data, trillions of parameters. And then you have to compute them to train the engine. For a startup, the fees will be very high. You need a high-scale business. But you can build on top of GPT.”
Dang said that, “If you ask the generative AI solution a question, you are not limiting yourself to any particular industry. You might say, I have a headache, what should I do, and next you might ask a question about healthcare or sports. So, it has to be trained across industries. The amount of new data being generated is exceeding what was generated for the past 10-20 years.”
Dang knows what he is talking about. He has invested in 20 companies, of which six are in the AI sector. “I think the next 10 years will revolutionize this sector.”
Dang hopes that AI will overhaul the health and education industries. “I hope the healthcare industry starts adopting GenAI because they’re not giving customized solutions to patients. Secondly, I think the health sector needs to also do faster drug discovery because during COVID we all felt that it’s too slow. You may see new viruses coming up, we can’t prevent that. In education, we’re still teaching kids how we used to teach 100 years ago. The world has changed so much. Let an AI teacher come in. Let’s see what happens in the classroom.”
