Pioneers of Desi AI

A tech duo refuses to play by rules of Big Tech players operating from the West

- Deepsekhar Choudhury

After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, big tech firms like Meta, Google and some heavily funded start-ups in the US and Europe started training their own large language models (LLMs). It was evident that just as the West had won the age of the internet because of its ability to burn cash, the age of artificial intelligence (AI) too would be theirs to rule.

At the time, experts said Indian start-ups and companies should not think about building their own LLMs—the foundation of generative AI applications—and instead focus on creating applications for health care, agriculture or education. The rationale was: India does not have the depth of capital necessary to build LLMs ground up.

But accepting this rationale would mean Indian innovators would always remain hostage to rent-seeking big tech firms of the West. “All those big companies have invested billions of dollars in this technology. Once they realise they need to recoup the cost, they will raise the prices. All that will happen in dollars,” says Tanuj Bhojwani, head of People+AI, a community attempting to use AI for social good. He explains that companies like Microsoft and Amazon are investing in LLM start-ups such as OpenAI and Anthropic and these AI services will be sold in a bundled form with the tech giants’ cloud offerings. “And then you get locked to pay for both,” he adds.

Enter Sarvam