India's AI Summit: Beyond Symbolism to Hard Reality and Global Power

• India hosts an AI summit to position itself as a serious actor in global tech discourse, emphasizing equitable development and ethical AI.
• The summit aims to bridge the gap between lofty aspirations and ground reality, focusing on measurable outcomes in key sectors.
• Despite geopolitical voice, India faces the challenge of lacking significant technological capability and innovation leadership in AI.
• Past AI summits have shown limited impact on technological control, with major breakthroughs remaining in proprietary labs.
• India needs to build domestic AI capability, including STEM ecosystems, compute infrastructure, and frontier research, to achieve true sovereignty.