Wingify's Chopra eyes tech subsidy for new AI venture

Founder also plans to use $200 mn he made off Wingify's sale to bootstrap the new project

- Rwit Ghosh

Wingify founder Paras Chopra has set his sights on getting access to subsidised graphic processing units (GPUs) from the government to help with his next big idea, a foundational artificial intelligence model.

Last week, electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced at a press briefing that 10,000 GPUs at a common compute facility will soon go online. The facility will be available to startups, academia, and developers through an online portal. The Centre will review requests for access to the GPUs based on requirements.

GPUs are a critical electronic circuit that help speed up processing of images and videos in computing.

"Building a foundational model has to be government supported, because it's really about capacity building and lifting the ecosystem," Chopra told Mint.

The entrepreneur's new firm, Lossfunk, comes at a time when discussion about foundational AI models has reached fever pitch. China's DeepSeek recently revealed its own open-source model, R1, which is quite cost-effective, posing a challenge to other top AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT.