Welcome everyone to this bright morning here in Delhi, where we have a confluence, a coming together of the best of global voice for AI from Google, and coming together from an Indian voice here.
First and foremost, we would welcome Lila Ibrahim, who has served as the first Chief Operating Officer for Google DeepMind and is now leading the entire AI readiness mission for Google and for Google DeepMind. We welcome Lila Ibrahim in India. And joining Lila in a candid fireside chat today is one of India's most influential technological and policy voices. Recognized as a pioneering need leader by the Gates Foundation, she has spent nearly three decades shaping India's technology industry. As a distinguished fellow at NITI Aayog, she heads NITI Frontier Tech. Please join me in welcoming Lila Ibrahim and Jyoti Goss for this conversation.
Ma'am, well, welcome to India. I didn't think I would get a chance to say that again. So apart from that wonderful introduction, I have to say that I've known Lila for a very, very, very long time, and we both were together in our previous lives working together in a company. And you know, the one thing about Lila, and I don't think I've told you this, is I've always been such a big fan of yours, right? I mean, just the commitment, the dedication, the let's get it done attitude that you brought to the table. I mean, it's just been so much fun watching you, watching your journey now, seeing where you are. It's just been amazing.
And let's talk about this, the charter that you are now driving, right? I mean, we are, I think, in the midst of this complete confusion where I think the big question is, are we ready for AI? Are things happening too soon? Are we ready for AI? And here you are driving the charter of AI readiness. So tell us a little bit about it. Let's start with that. I mean, who are you making ready? Are you making AI ready for us? Are you making us ready for AI? What does this charter really entail?
It's a great question. But first, let me just say thank you. It's wonderful to be in India again, and quite inspiring, in fact. And of course, the reunion, and the feeling is mutual. So I'm delighted to have the opportunity to have this conversation, especially today with you. You know, when we came up with this role, when Demis, the founder of DeepMind, and I were talking about the shift from Chief Operating Officer to creating a new role, we talked a lot about where the technology had been. We had been spending a lot of time on how do we think about building AI responsibly and building the organization to do that, and our own internal readiness. But the technology is coming at a pace right now that we have to be thinking about the benefiting humanity. What does that mean? And how do we ensure that the voices are brought in? We'd been doing that at a model level, but doing it with a more concerted and focused effort.
So a lot of the work that I'm doing now is actually defining what AI readiness means. I think I might be the world's first Chief AI Readiness Officer, but if I do this right, I won't be the last. So a lot of it is about how do we work with the local communities? We can't think about this as a bolt-on. We have to have their voices in from the beginning, whether it's farmers and what do they actually need, and how can AI, what problems are AI-shaped problems that we can help solve. They need to be able to own it at a local level, whether it's teachers or farmers or small business owners, governments. How do we help governments think about the policy, the implications, the technology itself, both AI as a topic and AI as a tool? So we're on this process together, I think, of defining what readiness means. It's not something you can copy and paste. It's something that we need to define within each community together.
No, absolutely. And you know what I really like about what you're saying is it's a human-first agenda. The human agency becomes extremely important in this topic and not a byproduct. I think that is the thing that we really need to fix in the current AI narrative. So it's really fantastic to hear you say that. Right.
Yeah, it's a great point. I like to think about it as advancing AI is so much of a technical and scientific endeavor, but readying society is innately a very human one. So it takes us working together. And in fact, actually, I wanted to ask you, given your role, I do think when I think about AI readiness, this can't be about any one company or country. We need to have a global perspective. We were earlier talking about the shift from the internet and the computing buildout to AI today, which, you know, when you launch a model, it's available to billions of people worldwide. So we have to approach this quite differently when you think about the collaboration ecosystem. Can you maybe tell me a little bit about what you're seeing here in India and what you think an ideal system of collaboration would look like?
Yeah. You know, I think what we are fundamentally witnessing right now, and this is globally, is that AI is moving from being seen as just a technology to becoming almost a strategic infrastructure that's driving economic growth, global competitiveness, national security, resilience, etc. So, you know, for a country, the meaning of AI and its implications is completely changing, and I think this is why the need to get it right becomes so important. In fact, it's a strategic decision. It's not something, okay, I'll do a pilot and I'll figure it out. I think the need to get it right becomes tremendously important. And I think there's also, at least in India, a growing awareness that if you really want to get it right, you have to bring in the entire ecosystem. And that's been our approach to technology right from the beginning. It's always been ecosystem-led, right? So it's about bringing together the ecosystem, the industry, the startups, academia, government, and listening to the different perspectives.
And I think one of the key things for me that stands out through these discussions is the biggest need right now is to just build trust into the system. That is the number one need. Everyone knows how good the technology is. Everyone knows the kind of problems it can solve, and not just at India level, but even at a global level. I think the one thing that stops us from fully unlocking the potential of this technology is unfortunately lack of trust. And if we can figure out a way, and I don't know, but if we can figure out a way to build trust back into the system, and get people to realize that working together is going to be way more beneficial for each one of us and the sum total, I think that's the day we will really get AI right.
I really like this concept that you're talking about of this ecosystem locally that you can build because there's trust within that, right? And it's a great example of where innovation can't be imported. It has to be locally grown. So how do you think about ensuring that you're addressing real problems for real people?
Yeah. And on that note, my next question to you is, Google has been doing a lot of great work in India. I think Preeti has been leading the charge fantastically, and you know, a lot of your initiatives are at the grassroots. They're dealing with real problems like local languages, etc. So how do you see this blueprint spanning out, right? Is it just to show, you know, because India is a good market to show how technology can be used in India, but or is the work that's happening in India actually contributing to a larger blueprint that can be used globally for building AI readiness?
It's a fair question and a good question because I think there's so much happening here. You have to really, like I would say, I've been so inspired by this approach of how do you build for and with India, and also think about how do we then take this to the rest of the world, to the blueprint. Maybe I can share a couple of examples of both where the technology has come and been used locally, and then where it's been developed here and then taken globally. AlphaFold. AlphaFold is Google DeepMind's advanced AI system that predicts the 3D structure of a protein, which is a basic building block of life. We put our advanced AI system towards solving this 50-year grand challenge of predicting a protein structure, and we're able to unlock our understanding of 250 million known proteins. We published that in a database worldwide for free for researchers. There's 180,000 researchers right here in India using this technology.
Which is the fourth largest in the world.
It's a great example of having something that is globally available. But the researchers here are applying the technology to challenges that are being faced here in India. So an example of that might be charcoal rot, which impacts certain crops. So if you can understand the plant and the crop and the disease interaction, which is a protein-based problem, you can develop more resistant crops. So these are the types of things that researchers are doing here, as well as a lot of work around malaria and other protein-based diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. So that's an example of maybe a global technology that is being applied locally to make a difference, which will then likely be able to be taken globally again.
I'm particularly excited about some of the work that's happening here in India, both around languages and also back to agriculture. I'll give an example on the languages project. Vonyi is working to over 100 different languages, and actually within Google DeepMind, our research team here in India is leading that effort, the language effort, not only for India but also globally. And I think there's a lot about language, the diversity of languages in India, to make the technology more accessible so we don't widen the gap, but the learning of how to onboard new languages, especially ones that have neglected data, and then how do you also put in dialect, like the ability to understand different dialects. The lead researcher was just telling me how they've been able to take this from months to weeks to days, and that's something that we've been able to export that innovation to other languages.
But maybe the area that excites me the most is agriculture. So when I'm not working on AI, I actually am a farmer back in my home state in Indiana in the United States, and I grow soybeans and corn. So I think a lot about agriculture. I come from a farming community, and I'm really excited because there's some work that's happening right here, based out of Hyderabad, with an organization called ICRISAT, and we're going to be doing some extraordinary work around sorghum, where we're starting to look at orphaned crops that typically, you know, can be a food supply for 500 million people. But the problem is so many of the crops have been based off of Western, not here in India. So we're going to be using AI to round out the database for that, and then be able to, again, the crop and disease drop resistant.
Again, it's a perfect example of where the technology can be developed here. But we're already thinking about how do we do this as an open catalog such that it can support global activities.
I think, you know, these are such inspiring examples of how AI should be used, you know, what AI should be known, what technology should be known for, right? And I think what I love about what you're saying is because it reinforces something we strongly believe in, that given its diversity and complexity, when you build for India, you actually build for the world. And the language example and the agri example you gave are such strong testaments to that fact.
Yeah. And even on the agriculture one, we're talking with farmers every other week to get their inputs on what the challenges are, how we might address that. And that's just one of many projects we have underway in farming. And I think farming is such an important example because it provides a livelihood for so many people, not just the farmers, but the food and fuel. We're also one of our projects that we've applied with understanding field crops and when to plant and how to help farmers get real-time information. We've already extended that, started in India, but have already taken that to nearly a dozen countries across Asia.
No, it's fantastic. And by the way, I do remember your passion for farming, and it's so good to see that you stayed true to it. And you're right, it's what puts food on our table, right? It's what sustains life. And one of the things we are doing in India also is to figure out, because when you think about farming in India, you know, usually we say Indian farmer, there is no such thing as an Indian farmer. There are so many different types of Indian farmers: the small farmer, the micro farmer, the medium-sized farmer, the large farmer, and the sophistication of their knowledge, their use of technology, their use of tools changes completely. So one of the challenges we have that, you know, we're grappling with is when we're talking about technology, how do you ensure that no one gets left behind?
Yeah, and such an important part of that is about the infrastructure.
