All innovations build on those that came before. It is important to strike a balance between leveraging intellectual property protection for commercial benefit and stifling innovation in the process. And this is particularly relevant in the context of AI.

India’s new data protection law will require businesses to make significant changes to the ways in which they conduct their business. To the point where they will have to fundamentally re-imagine their ways of working. It is not clear to me that many of them understand the sheer magnitude of what that entails.

The draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024 is so heavily influenced by European regulation that it feels like yet another example of premature imitation. Which is strange considering that we can so easily leverage our DPI to deliver much more nuanced outcomes.

One would have thought that digital technologies might have made this world a more inclusive place. As a matter of fact it has not. But there is a need for us to do better. A moral - and even economic - necessity to make this a more disabled friendly world.

Everyone agrees that there is an urgent need to reform many aspects of the judicial system. One way to do this might be to re-consider the reliance we currently place on oral advocacy and try and find an alternative way of doing things. Maybe even get rid of it entirely.

One of the fastest growing categories of AI services is artificial companions. Recent advances in large language models have significantly accelerated its proliferation. But as much as there are benefits to conversational engagement with artificial intelligence, there are psychological implications we will have to consider.

Good governance often calls for placing the values of the organisation ahead of short term gains. This is particularly important in AI, where the demands of investor to make quick returns can very easily incentivise companies to play fast and loose with safety.

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to significantly enhance our digital public infrastructure by bringing variety to a DPI approach that has so far been optimised for standardisation.

There has been growing concerns around the risks of open source AI. In the recent past these have begun to manifest themselves in the form of export restrictions on open source AI models - that could have a deleterious effect on India’s AI strategy.

There is a strange aversion in government circles to the use of open source software. I am no entirely sure where it comes from but I can try and debunk some of the misgivings they have. In most instances, releasing code as open source is actually a good idea.