Making India AI-Ready

IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) all that it's drummed up to be? Companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta and xAI are pouring billions of dollars in a race to create AI models with human reasoning ability. In China dozens of startups are replicating the low-cost GenAI breakthrough model of DeepSeek.

- Minhaz Merchant

Elon Musk's xAI has attracted significant venture capital funding. After merging his social media platform X with his AI startup, the combined entity xAI boasts a valuation of over $100 billion.

The firm's Grok3 chatbot has recently been upgraded and outdoes OpenAI's ChatGPT on certain parameters.

Amid the frenzy over AI, there are quiet words of caution. When will AI firms start delivering profits? Is there a viable business model to recoup the large investments made in creating human-like AI chatbots? Such doubts are shrugged off by those in the forefront of AI innovation. Among the most enthusiastic is Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. He is hiring AI-first engineers at astronomical salaries.

As The Wall Street Journal reported: "All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about 'The List', a compilation of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together."

The list includes Lucas Beyer, a highly-regarded Belgian scientist, and Yu Zhang, a researcher at OpenAI. Beyer specialises in multimodal vision-language models. Zhang works on speech and deep learning to discover innovative ways to enhance computer analyses and decipher speech.

The amounts being spent on AI are large even by Silicon Valley standards. Meta alone is reported to be investing over $70 billion on AI research. India is spending more modest sums but the AI ecosystem in the country is building rapidly. The recent allocation by the Union Cabinet of Rs 1 lakh crore towards R&D will help fund new AI startups among other tech firms.