Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella said that India is second to the US when it comes to the total number of developers on GitHub and it is going to cross that in 2027, making it the place with the maximum number of developers. In terms of generative artificial intelligence (AI) projects on GitHub by Indian contributors, it is next to the US.
“India is a place where the momentum around developers and development is unbelievable,” Nadella said to a packed crowd full of developers at an event in Bengaluru on Thursday. The underlying theme of the high-stakes event was the democratisation of AI, making it accessible and transforming lives and society at large. “It is awesome to see the human capital of the country embrace this new platform and effectively lead this new platform shift,” he added. “If you take 70 years of computing, one of the dreams has always been: Can we create computers that can understand us versus us understanding computers? I think we may be finally there with the breakthrough of natural language,” the Microsoft CEO said.
Nadella said developers tend to digitise people, places, and things, but with AI, things are changing. “We put into data models, query it, and essentially all our computing is getting up in the morning and digitising. Now, we have a new tool in our arsenal, think of it as a neural reasoning engine that can find patterns and give us that predictive power,” he said.
Nadella emphasised that developers need to understand the power of platform shifts as they are key to why we take these as inputs that drive economic growth in India. “Something like 10 per cent of India’s GDP growth can come from this output. And, that’s what grounds us in our mission to empower every person and every organisation in India to be able to achieve more and take advantage of this platform shift.”
Nadella went on to describe the key components of AI transformation opportunities for Indian organisations, which include enriching employee experience, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping business processes, and bending the curve on innovation.
Microsoft currently has the most comprehensive footprint with over 60 Azure regions and over 800 data centres worldwide. The 56-year-old also spoke about the scope of science breakthroughs with the help of AI. He mentioned new AI models such as Graphormer, M3GNET, MatterGen, MoleR, and GraphPE.
Along with the most comprehensive global AI footprint, Microsoft also has the best AI infrastructure and selection of frontier and open-source models. The CEO also mentioned Phi2, the company’s small language model (SLM), and said that he was bullish about the aggressive roadmap ahead in terms of the use cases of SLMs.
Indic languages and coding
As part of the keynote, Karan MV, senior manager at GitHub India, demonstrated how Indic languages came together with GitHub to offer coding solutions in local languages. Karan demonstrated coding commands in Hinglish, Devanagari, and Telugu scripts. The demo showed the ease of use and innovation that is being built into the platform.
Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia, who opened the Microsoft AI tour, showcased an image of Bengaluru created by Copilot. Chandok said that, at present, Microsoft is the most trusted and innovative partner in AI for everyone.
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