Vinod Khosla predicts AI will kill Indian IT sector in five years – Crypto News

Khosla, who cofounded Sun Microsystems and invented Java —once the world’s most used programming language—also pitched for India to build an “Aadhaar-like AI stack of public utilities,” stating that creating AI as a public-sector utility will help “truly democratize” the technology’s capabilities.

“I’m proposing that every Indian can get a free doctor 24×7 because of AI, which can then be triaged selectively to human doctors depending on cases,” he said. “Every Indian child can get a personal AI tutor in their language in their region, localized to their needs, interests and culture, in any corner of this country.”

Khosla’s remarks contrast with the views of Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of India’s second-largest software services provider, Infosys Ltd, the kind of companies the venture capitalist predicted could face the axe from AI. Nilekani is also the architect of Aadhaar.

“My view is that there is no opportunity gap. Opportunity is bigger than before,” Nilekani said about AI models accelerating software automation and putting tech services firms at risk. Investors rejoiced in Nilekani’s confidence, with Infosys shares rising 4.5% through the day.

Yet, Khosla’s warnings will ring in the ears of stakeholders in India’s technology industry, which has had $45 billion in market value wiped out since the start of the year amid fears of AI disruption.

“Technology services that are outsourced by Western companies, such as IT services and business process outsourcing, will essentially be eliminated over the next five years—before 2030. They will decline rapidly and will not be profitable, even if they may not completely disappear,” Khosla said. “There may be a few very specialized areas in these sectors where they may survive. But, India should be planning a transition out of those services because none of those companies can survive if they don’t do something very different.”

The 71-year-old, who was Sun Microsystems’s first chief executive, is among the world’s top tech investors. His firm Khosla Ventures has backed hyperlocal services firm Doordash, online grocery service Instacart, software platform Nutanix, fintech firm Stripe, and Indian AI startup Sarvam, among others.

It wasn’t Khosla alone to sound the warning bells for India’s tech sector. On Tuesday, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also said that the sector must “go whole-hog on reskilling and upskilling the workforce.”

“The IT industry is one of the biggest strengths that India has, and whenever any technology transition happens, this transition has to be managed combinely and jointly by the industry, academia and government,” the minister added.

According to Khosla, low-string software engineers may go obsolete without upskilling as there is “nothing an IT services engineer can do that an AI can’t do today, and AI can do it much better.”

The top investor, who arrived on Tuesday to participate in the India AI Impact Summit, will be a key speaker at the event alongside Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Govt policy to be ‘key differentiator’

Reiterating his focus on an Aadhaar-like stack for AI, Khosla added, “Every farmer can get their own PhD agronomists, and all of these would come for near-free because it’s only the cost of computing that will have to be accounted for, which isn’t very much. These basic utilities should become part of India’s Aadhaar services, such as UPI, to create a full stack including UPI, primary care, education and agronomy.”

“Achieving prosperity in all of this is possible at the highest level of expertise and expenditure, and there are no other ways of implementing it in a country like India. We can talk all we want about everything that should be done, but it won’t be done—because there just isn’t enough money to do it. What I’m talking about can be done with very little money—at only a small fraction of today’s budgets in healthcare, education, or economy.”

The innovator, however, said that government policy “will be the key differentiator and play a major role in how AI will progress” in the near future.

However, he highlighted that there were no clear reasons for India not to have its own Silicon Valley-like ecosystem of foundational technology corporations, which has seen executives like himself, among many others, flourish.

“The key to creating a sector is not to design it. My personal view is if you let creativity happen among the people. India has the talent right—30-40% of the startups in the US, in Silicon Valley, have Indian founders. That is a very large percentage. They can do the same work here, because India and Indians have talent,” said Khosla.

“They have the education and the expertise, and we just have to encourage them and build some roadmaps,” he said. “You know, once Flipkart was successful, then five others wanted to start a Flipkart or something else. So, role models play a large role in creating this.”