Meet our fellows!

Introducing Jayat!

With a Master’s in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and research experience at prominent public policy think tanks, Jayat aims to solve governance problems for safe and responsible AI.

Jayat is particularly excited about finding better ways to turn research into concrete, effective action.

“I think what holds a lot of people in the knowledge space from having real impact is that they are unable to take action that is effective. So we need more models for that.

We need to be able to structure those efforts.”

At Future Academy, his impact project aims to map out efforts for AI Safety (Governance) in India. This work is being jointly conducted with an interdisciplinary team of fellows– Amritanshu, Vaneesha, and Jyoti– who carry expertise in the AI safety (technical), legal, economic, and community-building aspects of the issue. 

“I feel that India, going forward, will have a huge role to play in the evolving discourse on AI governance”

Jayat shares some of the reasons why he believes that  their impact project addresses an important gap.

"I felt that there was there was not enough effort to map the AI governance landscape in India from a safety point of view; though the policy space in India has fast picked up on the AI trend. And so I feel that we are at the right moment where there is enough general awareness for one to produce research on the safe and responsible development and deployment of AI.

I would like our project to fill that gap and be used as a basis for future field building efforts in the Global South."

He also shares his views on the opportunities to shape technological development locally and globally.

"Actually, India is both data rich, as well as talent rich (in terms of numbers), because it's the most populous country and a very heterogenous society. So it's likely that whatever policies come out of here are going to impact a lot of people.

This is also correlated to the size of the market. A lot of data that will be generated will either be used to train indigenous LLMs or find its way into the economy through some use case or another. There is also an opportunity to harness this for the provision of services in education, healthcare and finance, all things that the Indian AI ecosystem is trying to solve for. And then there's a final aspect of the increasingly influential role that India is playing on the global forum, in bodies like G20, or the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI).

He finds that Future Academy allows fellows to experiment outside of mainstream institutions:

"I do feel that processes within mainstream institutions do not readily offer space for experimentation. And this could be in governments, academic spaces, think tanks; it is highly likely for a set way of doing things to become ossified.

So there is great value in investing in something like Impact Academy not just in India, but also in other Global South regions and emerging economies. I would be very excited if Impact Academy moves to an African nation or to other parts of South Asia."