India’s AI hackathon seeks to build local, open-source tech

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West. As frontier artificial intelligence becomes increasingly centralised in the hands of a few Western companies, India is betting that innovation doesn’t have to come only from the biggest labs. The country has launched a hackathon inviting startups, researchers, students, and academic institutions to build affordable, multilingual AI devices that work offline and run on open-source models. The goal is to create AI tools for classrooms, farms, clinics, and villages where cloud connectivity is unreliable, data privacy is critical, or English-language models fall short. Bhashini,…