Delhi AI Summit: Gates Confirmed, Safety in Doubt
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- Bill Gates will deliver his keynote at the Delhi AI Impact Summit as scheduled, the Gates Foundation confirmed, after overnight reports suggested he would no longer attend following questions over his appearance in the Epstein files.
- The AI Impact Summit in Delhi brings together tech bosses, politicians, scientists, academics and campaigners, with a proposed bottom-up Global South approach to AI governance focused on "people, planet and progress."
- India hosts AI hubs in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai and a large tech workforce, but AI data trainers in Chennai earn an average of 480,000 rupees (less than £4,000 or $5,000) per year, while OpenAI is valued at over $500bn.
- US AI chatbots fail to cover all of India's 22 official languages — ChatGPT and Claude support around half while Google's Gemini supports only nine, leaving millions excluded from education, healthcare, governance and banking.
- India's AI Mission operates on a $1.2bn government budget, dwarfed by the multi-billion dollar resources of US and Chinese firms (including DeepSeek and ByteDance) whose models continue to outpace India's sovereign platforms still in development.
- The word "safety" was quietly dropped from the summit's title after the 2023 UK AI Safety Summit, and British computer scientist Dame Wendy Hall told the BBC her expectations of "anything useful" from the Delhi event are "very low."
Why it matters: The summit is the first major AI gathering in the Global South, hosted by a country that supplies both skilled tech talent and low-paid data-labeling labor (under $5,000/year) for the very AI industry whose leading products don't work in most of its 22 official languages. With "safety" dropped from the title since 2023 and Hall publicly branding expectations "very low," the event risks producing aspirational statements rather than binding rules on firms now valued at $500bn-plus.
