From left: India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, with the chief executives of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Anthropic, Dario Amodei, at the AI Impact summit in Delhi. From left: India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, with the chief executives of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Anthropic, Dario Amodei, at the AI Impact summit in Delhi. AI hit: India hungry to harness US tech giants' technology at Delhi summit Narendra Modi's thirst to supercharge economic growth is matched by US desire to inject AI into world's biggest democracy I ndia celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, "early versions of true super intelligence" could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week. It's a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India's prime minister, Narendra Modi: can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to raise the prospects of its 1.4 billion people? Modi's hunger to harness AI's capability is great.

The tech bros might show more humility in Delhi - but will they make AI any safer? Those who shout the loudest about artificial intelligence 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. 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 marshal the AI revolution in the right direction. 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.

Suppose a revenue-maximizing recommendation algorithm concludes from past data that more revenue is generated by showing the ad to Group A compared to Group B. In that case, the ad-serving algorithm will eventually end up showing that ad exclusively to Group A

Such asymmetry presents two issues.

The president wants big tech to pay more for electricity, but he's curbing renewable projects that could boost supply Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans' resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party's November election ambitions? The US president's anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft's president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.