An Indian university was kicked out of the prestigious AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Wednesday. A professor had passed off a commercially available robot dog from China as her own groundbreaking innovation.
India actually wanted to use the summit to present itself as a new AI superpower alongside the US and China. But then this happened:
- The fraud: A professor from Galgotias University proudly explained on state television that the robot dog "Orion" had been developed at their own center of excellence.
- The exposure: Internet users identified the machine as a Unitree Go2 within minutes.
- The consequence: The university had to clear its booth, power was cut, and India's IT minister hastily deleted his celebratory posts on X.
High-stakes summit becomes chaos stage
The "robo-lie" is particularly explosive because the summit was attended by the absolute world elite: Prime Minister Modi, Emmanuel Macron, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were on the guest list.
India is investing massively in "IndiaAI" to develop sovereign AI models and not be dependent on US tech giants.
The country wants to establish a "third way" between the US and China – with open-source models, 7,000 public datasets, and planned investments of $200 billion in data centers.
But the path is still rocky so far.
📊 All details & data: AP, BBC, CNBC
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