Tech bosses, politicians, scientists, academics and campaigners are meeting at the AI Impact Summit in India this week for top-level discussions about what the world should be doing to try to guide the AI revolution in the right direction.
It has kicked off not just with long queues and confusion for some delegates, but also conflicting reports about whether keynote speaker Bill Gates would appear.
Reports overnight suggested the Microsoft founder – who has faced questions after appearing in the Epstein files – would no longer be addressing the Summit.
But the Gates Foundation has since confirmed his attendance, telling the BBC he will deliver his keynote as scheduled.
It reveals how the aims of this Summit – like others before it – can become overshadowed by other events.
Those who shout the loudest about AI tend to be in the West, notably the US and Europe.
So it’s significant that a gathering of powerful leaders is being held in the Global South, a region of the world that runs the risk of being left behind in the AI race.
At last year’s AI Action Summit, as it was then known, an ugly power struggle broke out between some Western countries over who should be in charge.
The various Western powers jostled for pole position in Paris, and US vice president JD Vance delivered a blistering speech in which he said America’s place at the top of the pack was non-negotiable.
I suspect there may be a more humble vibe this week in Delhi: the capital of a country which has helped to build the foundations that support this mega-powerful new tech – but is not reaping as much reward as the more affluent west.
There are some significant AI hubs in India, including in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai. It has a large tech workforce, and has attracted some big infrastructure investments from the likes of Google, Nvidia and Amazon.
At the same time, low-paid workers there have long been carrying out the unseen and painstaking task of manually categorising the vast amounts of data used to train the world’s AI tools.
In her book Empire of AI, the journalist Karen Hao writes about an unnamed firm in India which was contracted to do content moderation of AI-generated images: she claimed it included workers looking at horrifying ones to decide which should be blocked from being reproduced.
According to the recruitment website Glassdoor, the average salary for an AI data trainer in Chennai is 480,000 rupees – less than £4,000 ($5,000) per year.
It’s an essential role, but to put this into perspective OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is valued at over $500bn.
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