There is a debate whether India should develop LLMs or should be satisfied with SLMs. However, China has launched a low-cost DeepSeek, and that has a lesson for India — India cannot be sidelined as far as the development of foundational models.
In past, India put up substitutes for WhatsApp and Twitter by introducing Hike and Koo, but they could not succeed against their global counterparts.
Indian and Chinese economies cannot be compared, since China runs an authontarian regime and blocks platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. China can protect the domestic counterparts such as WeChat and Weibo. India on the other hand is an open economy. Any model India builds will face competition from both the US and the Chinese models.
Indian foundation model should be globally competitive. It has to remain sustainable.
As India is a big market for AI, it is expected to adopt AI. However, the paradox is that users favour the foreign models rather than indigenous models.
India’s AI mission has committed Rs.10000 crore. It proposes to build local foundational models. The real test is in execution. Indian models must be on par with the global models from OpenAI, Google or DeepSeek.
Indian IT companies are service-oriented and not product-oriented.
Indian companies are considering to switch to open-source models which allow them to build customized solutions avoiding prohibitive training costs. Open source declines API costs making AI more accessible to startups.
The government has announced AI safety institution. The India AI mission will satisfy the funding needs. India should develop foundational models and also be a part of AI ecosystem.
Future AI aspirations will depend on access to computing power, talent and market adoption.
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