India floats AI plan under which ‘The model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model’

As debate and legal argument continue over the extent to which developers of large language models are entitled to feed the world’s data into their systems without paying for it, India’s government has come up with an idea to regulate and secure the flow of information.

India’s motive is to create AI models trained on local data, because it thinks offshore model-makers won’t be motivated to address the nation’s issues or to ensure owners of data stay in control.

The scheme India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) thinks can make that happen is called the “Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for AI Training.”

As described by Professor Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, DEPA means “the model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model.”

The scheme envisions “Training Data Providers” (TDPs) – examples of which include hospitals, banks, and government agencies – sharing anonymized and encrypted data …