Accel's Prayank swaroop advocates for more Indian AI startups from Academia

Indian origin researchers are leading artificial intelligence and machine learning breakthroughs at companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon and yet not enough researchers based in India have opted to build AI startups, says Prayank Swaroop, partner at global venture capital firm Accel.

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The capital-intensiveness of building AI foundational research models could be one reason behind this, he said, adding that India with its large talent pool can, instead, leverage high-quality AI models and create applications for the world.

“We need more Indian AI startups coming from academia,” the senior executive at Accel, which counts Flipkart, Cure.fit, Ninjacart, Swiggy and BookMyShow among its portfolio companies.

“Indian developers are now dabbling with LLMs and building AI-native products, so it is only a matter of time before we see a truly disruptive AI-native product emerge from the country,” said Swaroop, who is also leading the AI cohort of Accel’s revamped early-stage accelerator programme, Atoms (now in its third edition).

Q:Will the momentum on AI die down anytime soon? What’s on the horizon for AI?

A: This is the year where we’re seeing generative AI applications come into widespread use with a number of real-life use cases being implemented across customer support, sales agents, call centre support etc. Moreover, media applications of AI in copywriting, image creatives creation and music generation are starting to become much more widespread. I believe we are just starting on a multi-decade journey of AI becoming part of human productivity.

We are witnessing an ever-increasing pace of innovation in LLMs (large language model), LLMOps (large language model ops), ML models and GPU (graphics processing units) compute. Foundational models and AI and machine learning toolchains are undergoing rapid innovation as we speak, across text, voice and video.