‘If I can handle family dinner with the Murthys, I can…’: Rishi Sunak’s quip at Delhi AI Summit goes viral

“It was like, are you going to be able to really keep up with the technical discussions that are going to happen here?” he said. “And I said to this person… ‘My wife’s uncle is an astrophysics professor at Caltech, my mother-in-law was one of the first female engineers at Telco, my brother-in-law is a computer scientist, and my father-in-law founded a software company.’”

He added with a smile, “If I can keep up with them at family dinner, I can probably handle the summit discussions.”

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Sunak also joked about his own academic path, noting, “To my parents’ great disappointment, I didn’t have a STEM degree, which they were sad about…” He explained the topic had resurfaced when his team was preparing to host the first AI summit and invite leading frontier labs for discussions.

Beyond the humour, Sunak struck a serious note about India’s growing influence in Artificial Intelligence. He said the country’s deep talent base and strong digital public infrastructure position it to play a leading global role in AI adoption.

According to him, perceptions of AI differ widely across regions. While much of the West is currently marked by caution and anxiety, India stands out for its “incredible optimism and trust.”

Sunak also pointed to major investments by frontier labs and their increasing focus on practical applications in India. He credited the country’s vast AI talent pool and its digital backbone for attracting this attention.

Highlighting platforms such as Unified Payments Interface and Ayushman Bharat, he said many Indians may take these systems for granted, but much of the world lacks comparable infrastructure.

“What they do is provide distribution rails for developing a product that can be distributed to a billion people in a trusted, digitally verifiable way,” Sunak said. “That’s extraordinary.”