HYDERABAD: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) found a place in this year’s Union Budget and Niti Ayog is set to establish a programme on AI, the topic dominated most of the sessions and talks at the WCIT-2018 and NASSCOM ILF on Monday.
Andrew Ng, a leading expert on AI and Co-Founder of Coursera, said there is a shortage of skilled individuals in the field of AI and Machine Learning and that India has a great opportunity to grow in the field. He also said that those who improved their skills in the field of AI would be “richly rewarded”.
When asked as to what are chances of developing countries like India making it big in AI when US and China are already making strides, he said every country was far from being developed when it came to AI and everyone had an equal chance.
Speaking on regulations on AI which is being debated across the world as AI becomes a hotly pursued technology, he said that a generalised horizontal regulation on AI would halt its development and regulations should be implemented only in verticals where it was required.
When asked regarding potential misuses of AI, he pointed out how AI can be misused by people for spreading fake news. Even governments can abuse AI to spread targeted information to people from specific regions, he added. Andrew also pointed out that more than 3 lakh people from India access courses related to AI from Coursera.
At another session, Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research India, said that there is tremendous potential of adoption of AI in enterprises and that the ongoing work in the world is still similar to scratching the surface.