Nothing like Cypher 🔥

As we wrapped up the eighth edition of Cypher, our confidence soared—humanity was standing on the brink of a transformative future. The fusion of human ingenuity and AI was poised to unlock unprecedented possibilities, driving innovation, progress, and a new era of intelligent solutions for the world.

The three-day AI conference held last week at the Hilton Convention Center, Bengaluru, had over 2000 participants and 900+ companies in attendance. Special thanks to the AIM Media House team that made this event a grand success. 

Next up? Cypher 2024’s US edition in Santa Clara, California, on November 21 & 22. 

Inside India’s Biggest AI Conference 

In the opening keynote for Cypher 2024, Raja Jamalamadaka, the head of Roche Information Solutions India, said that the true success of generative AI lies not just in its technical capabilities, but in how well it integrates with human intelligence, emotions, and trust. 

Jamalamadaka believes that the real danger lies not in machines becoming more human-like, but in humans becoming more like machines. 

He said that while AI can process vast amounts of data, it lacks the ability to replicate human creativity, empathy, and contextual understanding, which are crucial for effective adoption. “Without trust and empathy, even the best AI solutions will fail to gain traction,” said Jamalamadaka. 

Further, he said that “high touch precedes high tech” and urged organisations to focus on building emotional connections and trust within teams to ensure that AI enhances human capabilities rather than simply automating processes.

Shalvi Chitkara, the COO of data and AI at Genpact, delivered a compelling talk on creating AI-ready organisations. She emphasised that while AI brings immense potential, its success hinges on bridging talent with technology. Organisations need to focus not just on technological solutions, but on fostering a culture of AI fluency across all teams, from core AI skills to user adoption. 

Chitkara also highlighted that a seamless integration of AI requires aligning technology with business needs, building strong data architectures, and ensuring robust AI governance. “Technology alone won’t drive AI adoption; it’s the combination of talent, tools, and a culture of continuous learning that will determine success,” she added. 

Vignesh Subrahmaniam, group manager (data science) at Intuit, delivered an insightful talk on the ‘Evolution of Deep Learning and Generative AI’ highlighting how it has grown from its statistical roots to now solving complex, real-world problems. 

He explained how key innovations like gradient descent, auto-differentiation, and large-scale parallel computing have empowered machines to learn from vast datasets, simulating human-like decision-making processes. Vignesh emphasised that generative AI’s potential is not limited to human-generated content but extends to healthcare, weather forecasting and much more.         

He said that the future of AI will involve “small, task-specific language models” optimised by newer, more efficient algorithms, leading to even more profound impacts across industries. 

Sarvam AI founder Vivek Raghavan was at Cypher too. He echoed similar thoughts, and discussed the trade-off between using large models, like those from OpenAI and Anthropic, and smaller, more efficient models for specific use cases.

“If you want to do something a million times a day, and it's a very narrow thing that you want to do, a small model is always the answer. It is more accurate, more efficient, dissolves latency, and probably also causes less global warming,” said Raghavan. 

At Cypher 2024, Nikhil Malhotra, chief innovation officer at Tech Mahindra, announced the launch of upcoming Project Indus 2, a state-of-the-art AI model focused on Hindi and its dialects, and highlighted the company's efforts in building sovereign language models across Southeast Asia, starting with Indonesia’s Garuda.

“The era of sovereign LLMs has just begun,” said Malhotra, highlighting the global shift toward country-specific LLMs, each tailored to reflect and preserve cultural and linguistic identities. 

Further, he said that Tech Mahindra’s focus is on efficiency and purpose, advocating for smaller, effective models rather than competing to build excessively large LLMs. “We are not in a race to build 170 billion parameters, because after 3 to 4 billion parameters, the model knows the language,” he added. 

SML’s founder Vishnu Vardhan announced the upcoming release of India’s first multimodal multilingual AI model, Hanooman, built to support 100 languages, which aims to revolutionise sectors like healthcare while addressing data scarcity in Indian languages. 

“We will be releasing India’s first multilingual multimodal Hanooman around the first week of October. We started working on 22 Indian languages, and now it works in 100 languages, and has been built from scratch in India,” said Vardhan, in his keynote speech at Cypher. 

Also at the event, renowned AI scientist Jim Samuel lauded Google DeepMind’s work around AlphaGo, AlphaChess and AlphaFold, alongside OpenAI o1 for its advanced reasoning capabilities. “These are some really good AI innovations,” he added. 

In a fireside chat with AIM journalist Vandana Nair, Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh expressed scepticism about claims that AGI (artificial general intelligence) will be achieved within two to five years, emphasising that such projections are unrealistic and driven by business motives rather than technological reality. “For anyone to say that AGI will happen in two years or five years, no way!” said Nadh.         

He reflected on the historical pattern of overestimating AI timelines and how recent breakthroughs still build on long-term research. “AI was always five years away for many, many years. Today, we have amazing breakthroughs built on many decades’ worth of research,” said Nadh.

He also highlighted the critical role of open source in shaping Zerodha’s success. “Open source is fundamental to Zerodha’s existence. Without it, there would be no Zerodha, no Indian startup ecosystem, and no global technological explosion over the last two decades,” he added. 

In another fireside chat, Srikanth Iyengar, the CEO of upGrad Enterprise, and Ronnie Screwvala, the co-founder of upGrad and Swades Foundation, spoke about the crucial role AI will play in achieving India’s Viksit Bharat @2047 vision, aiming for a $30 trillion GDP by 2047.

Screwvala believes that balancing profitability and impact is key to driving sustainable growth in India. “India is a country where impact and profit go hand-in-hand, creating immense opportunities for growth,” he added.  

Meanwhile, Shekar Sivasubramanian, the CEO of Wadhwani AI, emphasised the need for AI to solve real-world problems in India by focusing on deployment over research, highlighting that “If AI works in India, it can work anywhere” due to the country’s diversity and its unique user types—urban “India” and rural “Bharat”.

In conversation with senior journalist Bhupendra Chaubey, Mohandas Pai, the former CFO of Infosys, emphasised the deepening partnership between India and the US, and said that “Bengaluru is closer to San Francisco than Delhi” due to its thriving tech ecosystem. 

He urged the Indian government to support startups in developing breakthrough technologies like ChatGPT to secure India’s position as a global AI leader. “The Government of India should invest INR 50,000 crore in AI,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Shreevyas HM, project director at e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, announced the state’s commitment to AI-driven governance through its collaboration with the World Economic Forum to establish a dedicated AI centre and highlighted several initiatives. 

“Although Karnataka started its AI journey late, we are committed to using AI to improve service delivery,” said Shreevyas, underscoring its ongoing efforts to public service delivery using AI, alongside inviting the tech community to collaborate on developing impactful AI solutions for Karnataka’s diverse challenges.

Indian football legend Bhaichung Bhutia, in a fireside chat with Korak Roy, lead anchor at AIM, highlighted the necessity of adopting technology to enhance India’s sports sector, drawing connections to tech innovation. “We need to embrace technology if India is to grow as a sporting nation,” said Bhutia. 

In a first-of-its-kind fireside chat with AIM editor Amit Raja Naik, G42 India CEO Manu Kumar Jain lit up the stage with insights on NANDA (named after the second-highest mountain in India, Nanda Devi) — one of the largest and most advanced Hinglish AI models to date. 

“With NANDA, we are creating a model that speaks to India–its languages, its people. This is not just about AI for a few; it’s AI for a billion,” said Jain.         

Yotta’s chief, Sunil Gupta, also set the stage on fire when he announced the deployment of over 16,000 GPUs, all thanks to its elite partnership with NVIDIA. With this, the company is now looking to revolutionise India’s AI landscape by empowering localised, scalable AI solutions that go beyond the reliance on pre-trained models. 

“Being an elite NVIDIA partner gives us unparalleled access to high-end GPUs, ensuring that India can stay at the forefront of AI innovation. We’re not just talking about small-scale projects; we’re equipped to build large-scale, world-class models right here in India,” said Gupta, citing Yotta’s AI supercomputer project in Telangana. 

The highlight of this year’s Cypher was the AI.Q Quiz with Cyrus Broacha, where he brought together the fun and excitement of knowing everything that’s happening in AI and beyond. 

Lastly, the Minsky Awards took centre stage, recognising pioneers across 20 categories for their groundbreaking innovations. The awardees included IDFC FIRST Bank for Best Firms Certification (second time), Wells Fargo for AI for Social Impact, and Accenture for Outstanding AI-Powered Business Transformation among others, presented by Indian football legend Bhaichung Bhutia. 

See you next time :) 

Think AI, Think AIM.