, a Section 8 non-profit company, created for the purposes of increasing innovation in the law and justice sector, including by creating digital public goods and infrastructure. The OpenNyAI mission, created in 2021, aims to create AI public goods and a robust multi-disciplinary legal AI community to aid AI adoption in the justice domain. The other members of the mission include the data science company Thoughtworks, the non-profit Ekstep, and National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Why do we exist?
We live in a world where AI and its applications have exploded. AI could be for the 21st century what the digital boom was to the late 20th. Today, a farmer sitting in rural Haryana can hold up his phone, and in his native Haryanvi converse with a bot on his phone to discover what his rights and entitlements as a farmer are. The right AI can turn the phone into a helpful local aid through which a slew of powerful new possibilities now become available for those at the last mile.
To understand what we can make possible, we must understand first where we are.
There are more than 1.4 billion people living in India and only about 10 percent of the population can access tools and services advancing justice. The language divide, the digital divide, and the knowledge divide continue to sharpen even as we keep making progress.
AI has the potential to bridge these gaps, crush the cost of reaching the last person, and level the playing field. In a country with 22 official languages and over 100 unofficial ones, AI language tools and generative AI tools can bring vital information and services directly to the citizen in their own language. Legal AI tools can also empower para-legals and local lawyers to do more and reach more. A quick scan to easily identify if a property deed is up to standard; A quick Q&A to understand what legal risks exist in a commercial transaction; A quick review to ensure that an error-free legal application or form gets submitted to a system. Courts and other dispute resolution fora can be transformed with judges and resolution professionals having easy access to precedents and relevant documents. With digital privacy and protocols in place, this can unlock impact at scale. Where this technology is available openly and cheaply, it can unleash a whole host of innovation and practitioners who have so far not found a role to play in the field, by inviting them to problem-solve, share and cross-pollinate their ideas by building solutions openly. Consequently, bringing the cost of creation down for everyone.
With the OpenNyAI movement, we’re building the enabling conditions in which such AI based solutioning for justice can thrive. At its core, this means a proactive ecosystem that is building more fundamental technologies, making available training data for custom LLMs, and supporting high-impact use cases. This is being done with a community of collaborators, from entrepreneurs to data scientists, to students and academics, engaged in regular Learning Circles and actively building at Maker Residencies. Take a look at what we’ve built thus far.
By simply embracing the values of being open, collaborative, transparent and inclusive, the OpenNyAI mission invites innovators from diverse walks of life to play in this field and evolve it further. The cost of not doing so is to leave the application of AI in critical public use cases to market forces that may prioritize the needs of a much smaller audience and certainly not the last mile citizen - the 1.4 billionth, Indian.
The AI age can be the Justice age for India and other developing countries. At OpenNyAI, we are working to enable this.
Our Approach
We build open-source, AI Digital Public Goods available for anyone to use on a permissive open-source licence such as MIT or Apache 2.0. These Digital Public Goods come in the form of datasets, stacks and models.