NEW DELHI: The world's largest artificial intelligence summit opened to packed halls and long queues on Monday, as tech moguls, industry leaders, poli-cymakers, founders, and tech-nologists thronged the venue for the conference, where India is set to push for widening access to Al and seek interna-tional agreement on global Al commons.
With huge billboards around the city welcoming delegates, speakers and guests at the Al Impact Summit, Bharat Manda-pam saw long queues much before the conference opened at 09.30 hours, signalling the interest in the subject and the conference.
The enthusiasm was high despite the fact that the high profile speakers - from Sundar Pichai of Alphabet to Sam Alt-man of OpenAl and Dario Amo-dei of Anthropic - haven't even arrived in the country. Their sessions start not before Wednesday.
Final two days of the Summit February 19 and 20 - will see more than 20 heads of state and government, including France's Emmanuel Macron and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with Indian Prime Minister Nar-endra Modi, talking about the future of Al alongside business leaders and investors.
A team of PTI reporters on the ground saw long queues outside the halls that are host-ing different sessions. There were some logistics issues, but the conference was orderly and
well organised.
Multiple parallel sessions are happening at the same time and all of them are packed to capac-ity.
From February 16 to 20, the summit will feature over 3.250 speakers and more than 500 sessions.
"Sessions are packed. There are long queues, and once the halls fill up, doors are closed. which creates some hassle for those still waiting outside," an enthusiastic participant said. "You have to be there for a ses-sion well in advance. One can-not float around from session to session like in other conferen ces."Another person said an interesting line up of speakers is
