IT & Computers

Story hook

On 30 November 2022, an obscure San Francisco research lab called OpenAI released a chat interface for its latest language model, GPT-3.5. They named it ChatGPT. Within five days, it had 1 million users — faster than Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter ever grew. Within two months, it had 100 million. By the time the Indian Parliament returned from winter recess, an entire profession's worth of code, essays, briefings, and translations were being drafted by a statistical model that predicted the next word.

The technology wasn't new — large language models had been studied since 2017. What was new was that the model was good enough to matter. Suddenly, the question wasn't whether AI would reshape the economy, but how fast. Governments scrambled. The EU finalised its AI Act in 2024. US issued an Executive Order on AI in October 2023. China rolled out generative-AI rules within months.

India's response came in March 2024 with the ₹10,371 crore IndiaAI Mission — a Cabinet-approved programme to build 10,000 GPUs of compute capacity for Indian researchers, fund indigenous foundation models, and create the world's largest publicly-funded AI dataset platform for sectors like agriculture, health, education. By 2025, Krutrim (Ola), Sarvam AI, and Bhashini (government) had Indian-language LLMs in production. The race to build a sovereign Indian AI stack was on.

Why this matters for UPSC

AI is now the most rapidly examined emerging-tech topic in UPSC — first detailed Prelims question in 2024, multiple Mains sub-questions in GS-III on technology and ethics. Interview boards routinely probe AI's regulatory, employment, and ethical dimensions. The topic spans GS-III (S&T, internal security cyber), GS-IV (ethics), and Essay (technology + society).