NDTV Exclusive: Google DeepMind's Top Voice On How India Is Shaping Global AI

In an exclusive interaction with NDTV's CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal, Google DeepMind's Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim shared that she sees India not just as an AI user but as a source of models that can be exported. 

According to DeepMind, India is the fourth largest user globally of AlphaFold, its AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences.

When asked where India stands on her readiness index compared with other countries, Ibrahim, whose role at Google's AI arm - is to help prepare governments, institutions and society for the impact of increasingly powerful AI systems - did not give a ranking. Instead, Ibrahim highlighted what DeepMind has learned from India and its global implications.

She spoke about Google's AnthroKrishi programme, an AI initiative by Google DeepMind and the Google Partner Innovation team that provides high-resolution, field-level agricultural intelligence and landscape mapping

"Working with 600,000 farmers here in India, we've been able to export that technology now to 11 different countries around the world with ambitions to take it even broader," Lila shared.

The programme's two satellite-based models, ALU and AMED, generate field-level agricultural intelligence. Eleven nations across Asia-Pacific and Africa are now testing their outputs. In Telangana, the state's Agriculture Data Exchange uses them to support innovations serving over 5 million+ farmers.
India acts as a catalyst for making technological progress through its scale and diversity, she said.

"I think with the diversity of the country itself, along with the technological mindset and focus on real world problems for real people, we're able to get extraordinary progress here and to think about 'how are we not only benefiting India in collaboration, but how can we use this as a blueprint for the world?'," Ibrahim noted.