NEW DELHI (Kashmir English): The administration of an Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country’s flagship AI summit after they presented a Chinese robot as their own.
A staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation which led to the development.
“You need to meet Orion,” the professor told an Indian TV reporter as the dog performed tricks such as waving at the camera and springing up on its hind legs.
“This has been developed by the centres of excellence at the Galgotias University,” she said, touting the institution’s investments in artificial intelligence technology.
“As you can see, it can take all shapes and sizes… it’s quite naughty also,” she said.
However, social media users quickly identified the robot as the Unitree Go2, sold by China’s Unitree Robotics for about $2,800 and widely used in research and education globally.
Robot was not a university creation
Both the university and the professor subsequently said the robot was not a university creation and the university had never claimed otherwise.
The episode has drawn sharp criticism and cast a negative spotlight on the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions.
IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also shared the video clip on his official social media account but just to earn embarrassment and backlash. The post was later deleted.
The stall remained open to visitors as of Wednesday morning, with university officials fielding questions from the media about accusations of plagiarism and misrepresentation.
According to a representative at the booth, Galgotias has yet to receive any communication about being kicked out of the event.
The India AI Impact summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, will run until Saturday, and has been tagged as the first major AI gathering hosted in the Global South.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei will address the gathering on Thursday (today).
India’s biggest opposition party, Congress, was amongst those expressing outrage on the episode. “The Modi government has made a laughing stock of India worldwide with regard to AI,” it said on social media, citing the robot incident.
