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AI ubiquity and exponential India were the two big focus areas at TieCON 2024, an annual event in in Santa Clara, California that attracts the country’s expats as well as entrepreneurs and investors from across India.

The headline speaker at this year’s event was Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia, who has achieved rock star status in the tech sector. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are the engine behind the AI boom because they enable the ability to run lots of computations at the same time. Demand for the GPUs currently outstrips supply. They are considered so valuable that customers hire been known to hire armored trucks to transport them.

The conference celebrated not just Silicon Valley stars like Nvidia or the successes of Indian expats that have added an estimated $1 trillion and two million jobs to the U.S. economy, but also the made-in-India innovation being adopted globally.

“We should stop thinking of India as a geographic area,” because the country's influence extends far beyond its borders, said venture capitalist Asha Jadeja Motwani, who ran the exponential India track at the conference.

Components of the India Stack, now called Citizen Stack, the name for a set of open APIs and digital public goods that has unlocked identity, data, and payments at population scale in India, helping promote financial and social inclusion, have been adopted by eleven countries, pointed out panelist PK Gulati, a technology innovator and angel investor.

No one likes to see the lawyers get involved. But in AI, as in all things, the lawyers have a very definite role to play. The use of AI implicates rights and interests and grey areas, and it will produce new opportunities and new types of agreements, along with new types of disputes. It will test the application of existing laws and reveal gaps to be filled with new laws. So, the law and lawyers are at the beginning their own steep innovation curve, along with everyone else.

It would be easy to think that the legal issues are all about copyright, with Open AI and Stability AI and other foundation models being sued by over a dozen companies for breach of their copyrights. In fact, it is partly about that – these are indeed important issues to sort out in the courts and in board rooms. But there is much more to it. Those that insist on moving fast and breaking things would do well to remember that the lawyers are innovating too.
Read on to access this exclusive column for The Innovator written by Kay Firth Butterfield, a barrister, former judge and one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance, She is the founder and CEO of Good Tech Advisory. Until recently she was Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. In February she won The Time100 Impact Award for her work on responsible AI governance.

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Cirplus, a German scale-up, has developed a global B2B procurement platform for recycled plastics, connecting recyclers, compounders, plastic converters, and brand owners in sectors such as fast-moving consumer goods, (for packaging) construction, agriculture, home appliance and automotive. The company's platform is used by more than 3,500 companies.

Cirplus says its goal is to establish a one stop shop for recycled plastic procurement to reduce the transaction costs for using recyclates on a global scale. “We are not recycling ourselves, we are digitizing the process around buyers and sellers, to make the process more efficient,” says founder and CEO Christian Schiller, a seasoned entrepreneur who previously led the German operations for BlaBlaCar, a global ride-sharing service.

By 2040 a circular economy has the potential to reduce the annual volume of plastics entering the oceans by 80%; reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25%; generate savings of $200 billion per year and create 700,000 net additional jobs, according to the Ellen MacArthur Association.

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