India's AI efforts likely underrated

LIKE DEEPSEEK, INDIA HAS VISWAM AND SARVAM, TRYING TO MAKE GENAI ACCESSIBLE

- Charles Assisi

On Thursday, when technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said six homegrown Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are in the works and will go live by the end of this year, there were a few sniggers all around. What everyone knows is that the Americans started the AI race with expensive models most people know of as ChatGPT and Gemini. And now the China-built DeepSeek has overturned all assumptions that has the world stunned. So, how is India to get a foot in the door? To start at the beginning will help us understand this better. Yishan Wong, CEO of Terraformation and former CEO of Reddit, does the best job of sifting through it all.

Right now, everyone's panicking about DeepSeek because it came out of China. But that's the wrong way to look at it. Fact is, DeepSeek could've been invented anywhere. Let's say, an American lab very unlike OpenAI didn't have a big budget to buy the most expensive equipment. The team had to get creative. So, they found smarter ways to train their system, figured out a bunch of clever shortcuts, and-voilà!-they ended up with something as good as the big players who spent a fortune.