**These post build upon my thoughts about AI sovereignity following the workshop last week. Its mainly an exploration of two ideas. One is the idea of thinking of soverignity from an societal use-case perspective. The other is an AI diffusion framework. **

Fleshing out the Industry-Academia Idea

A good and simple framework for diffusing any new radical idea is “Connecting good people to good ideas and good networks” (from Takshashila’s mission). By connecting key actors in the ecosystem - industries, academia, researchers, and large tech companies - we can create a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle that benefits everyone. The government is ideally positioned to orchestrate and accelerate this process.

The main government implementation would work as follows:

• Top Central universities incentivizing researchers to do sabbaticals in industry (focusing on AI implementation) via grants
• Government guiding certain industries to collaborate with researchers through incentives like tax benefits. Researchers would work on hard industry problems and, at minimum, focus on modernizing processes & optimizing costs

Here are some further notes I had taken down in the workshop

* More cross pollination of talent between academia and industry
  * Universities incentivize researchers to do AI industry sabbaticals (with grants from UGC). Specialized budget allocation from Union Govt.
  * Initially start with IIT/NIT/IISc, researchers with good & relevant creds.
  * Also beneficial to researchers in terms of funding & having more impact.

* Legacy Industries become more dynamic & competitive again
  * Involves slightly more thoughtful intervention of hand-twisting legacy tech firms to collaborate with researchers from universities. Tax benefits structure for better cooperation
  * Start with out of box thinking. But at minimum focus on modernizing processes & optimizing costs.

* Large Tech companies become more India centric (dependent) & stronger
  * Large tech companies are self incentivized to support research Academia with infra for priority access to research.
  * Build mindshare for cloud platforms
  Intervention is minimal from govt in terms of program management.

* Universities build a stronger technical consulting business
  * The other outcomes boosts this opportunity.
  Compete with consulting companies.
  * Valuable IP: if above outcomes leads to better commercialization of their research

AI Sovereignty and Government Approach

At the workshop’s conclusion, like many others, I wasn’t fully convinced by our solution for AI sovereignty. Our definition seemed unclear and too heavily influenced by Western notions rather than being suitable for India’s context.

India needs its own definition of AI sovereignty because our situation is different. We don’t have the same resources or tech skills as developed nations, need to serve a vastly diverse population, and our government systems aren’t as technically sophisticated. With AI’s future impact still uncertain, simply copying others’ solutions isn’t appropriate.

The government might better understand AI sovereignty’s importance by seeing how AI can improve government services. This practical approach could help shape a more India-specific view of AI sovereignty.

Here are some further notes I had taken down in the workshop

* Rural Education
  * can it help overcome blooms 2 sigma problem ?
    * should be easy to measure by test scores
  * more interactive learning for primary school student
* AI as an Bueracracy tamer
  * Speed up paperwork & filling forms
  * Help provide better services to citizens
  * Govt shouldn't be spending money on routine grunt work if it can be handled by an AI system.