India Needs to Think About Its LeapFrog Moment in AI Research

Professor B Ravindran heads the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) and is regarded as a leading expert on artificial intelligence. His work has shaped national AI policies and thinking on using the technology ethically. Ravindran, in an interview with Shine Jacob in Chennai, spoke about India's progress in AI. Edited excerpts:

- Professor B Ravindran

When can we see Indian large language models (LLM) like China's DeepSeek or a ChatGPT of America's Open AI?

It (DeepSeek) didn't happen momentarily. The Chinese government deliberately started investing in it over a decade ago. It's just that DeepSeek caught the public imagination. In fact, there are at least 50 organisations in China that could have done something like DeepSeek. Hence, it is not a DeepSeek moment, not a lone wolf fighting against a system and creating it. A whole ecosystem was developed, including agentic models (a type of AI system). Some of the first open-source agentic models came out from China; the US came later.

What is the status of LLM development in India?

It's something that we are starting now. We have the benefit of hindsight by learning from various companies and countries. We shouldn't be thinking about producing the next ChatGPT; our focus should be on AI penetration. That will help people access AI; you don't need high-end GPUs (graphics processing unit) or a power plant just to power AI.

India needs to think about what should be the leapfrog moment. We are now waking up in terms of AI infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't only mean compute, we need data. We need to develop our own datasets, our own tokenizers, and build a training pipeline and perhaps our own models.