Technology is rapidly spreading its wings making human lives easier. The next-gen technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) is empowering the world to evolve further. Organizations are preparing to harness the full potential of AI across industries and solve critical issues through AI-driven innovations. Dphi is working in the direction to make AI education accessible to all and solve real-world problems. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently interacted with Chanukya Patnaik, Founder and CEO, DPhi. Mr. Chanukya talked about their brand, market, upcoming plans, and much more. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: Please brief about DPhi.
Chanukya: DPhi is a global AI community with the purpose to make AI education accessible to everyone and build AI for good to solve key challenges of humanity.
As part of our community initiatives, we provide free AI and data science courses by industry experts from large tech companies or startups worldwide. Over 100K+ learners from 150+ countries have benefited since our inception in 2020. The impact of the DPhi community extends beyond education; our Crowdsourcing AI Platform empowers community members to apply their skills to solve real-world problems. It has fostered AI-driven innovation among several leading companies and solved meaningful problems, including predicting earthquakes to save lives, safeguarding NFTs, and building an AI-powered lens for the blind.
Rajeev: How would you evaluate the current state of AI education, and what is DPhi doing to address it?
Chanukya: Before talking about that, I should probably talk about AI's prominence and impact. AI is widely believed to transform the world, and companies spent $342 billion on it last year. Its potential is estimated to reach $2.8 trillion (equivalent to the current Indian economy). In reality, however, AI awareness and development remain a challenge, and we are far from utilizing AI's full potential. Various factors contribute to this, such as lack of awareness of best practices of AI, shortage of industry-ready talent, and the expense and time involved in AI research and development.
Organizations often find it hard to build robust AI expertise, and over 85% of projects fail to drive impact. With academia and industry focusing more on AI education, it may appear that we're headed in the right direction. However, a lot more focus should be there on developing hands-on skills and teaching best data practices.
At DPhi, one of our objectives is to make high-quality AI education accessible to all. Hands-on learning and real-world problems are fundamental to our courses, and that keeps learners engaged. We started our journey with a free data science bootcamp in collaboration with the help of 20+ renowned data scientists. Since then, we've been able to impact 100K+ learners from 150+ countries get started with data science education. This is made possible by industry experts who have been there and done that in terms solving data science problems at large scale in companies.
Furthermore, we never saw education as a commodity but as a means for a better future; hence, we continue to provide all our courses for free. Anyone with little to no experience in data science can start and grow in their AI journeys to solve real-world problems using data science. Our learners have published more than 90K+ ML models and solved several real-world business and social problems through our community AI challenges. It indicates our impact on society as we continue on our mission.
Rajeev: Please brief about your upcoming AI marketplace. What is the core objective behind launching the marketplace?
Chanukya: There is a significant vacuum in the industry, resulting in companies struggling to drive impact with AI projects. Right now, the adoption of AI that we are seeing is primarily due to the application of AI at large tech companies. We are yet to harness the full potential of AI across industries and companies of all sizes. With the DPhi AI marketplace, the objective is to make ready-to-use AI solutions built by the best data scientists accessible to companies of all sizes that will allow us to aid large-scale AI adoption among companies. This will be handy to startups and enterprises alike, especially those who want to use AI in their products but have limited or no AI expertise in-house. With the marketplace, AI adoption will no longer be a distant dream for companies, and we look forward to democratizing the use of AI with a community-driven approach where the solutions are built by the best data scientists in the world.
Rajeev: What are your future growth plans? Please tell about your vision by 2025.
Chanukya: We are looking forward to preparing the world for AI-era. In the process, we intend to launch new initiatives and products focused on AI education and development. By 2025, our focus is to empower five million+ individuals with AI/data literacy and build 1000+ ready-to-use AI solutions catering to various industries. Further, we are looking to establish 1000+ DPhi-powered Data Science & AI Skill Development labs among universities and incubate 500+ individuals/startups who want to build AI solutions for the world.
