‘India Capable Of ISRO-Like Feat In AI Too’: Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas Disagrees With Nandan Nilekani – News18
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Last Updated:January 21, 2025, 16:55 IST
Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, on X: “Nandan Nilekani is awesome, and he’s done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he’s wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus…Read More
Nandan Nilekani (left) and Aravind Srinivas. (PTI File)
After Google Research India’s Manish Gupta, Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, too, disagreed with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s view on artificial intelligence and training models, saying that India must instead “show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feat for AI”.
Nilekani has often said that India should focus on building use cases for AI on top of the large language models (LLM) that are available globally. “Nandan Nilekani is awesome, and he’s done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he’s wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both,” said Srinivas in a post on X.
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“I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a shit ton of money to train. But India must show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feat for AI. Elon Musk appreciated ISRO (not even Blue Origin) because he respects when people can get stuff done by not spending a lot. That’s how he operates. I think that’s possible for AI, given the recent achievements of DeepSeek,” wrote Srinivas.
Re India training its foundation models debate: I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a shit ton of money to train. But India must show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feet for AI. Elon Musk…— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 21, 2025
“So, I hope India changes its stance from wanting to reuse models from open-source and instead trying to build muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks. I’m not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like company for India, but I’m happy to help anyone obsessed enough to do it and open-source the models,” he added.
To be clear: Nandan Nilekhani is awesome, and he’s done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he’s wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both.— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 21, 2025
At the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Gupta had said that he “respectfully disagreed” with Nilekani’s advice on prioritising use case building over building foundation models around AI.
“He is not preaching what he practised. He revolutionised India’s technology landscape by starting with the basics. With Aadhaar, he did not start with use cases, he started with building foundations. We too must, using our constraints as ingredients for innovation,” Gupta had said.
Responding to Gupta’s views, Nilekani had told TOI last month: “Foundation models are not the best use of your money. If India has $50 billion to spend, it should use that to build compute, infrastructure, and AI cloud. These are the raw materials and engines of this game.”
Location : First Published:January 21, 2025, 16:42 IST
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