Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, who has been quite vocal about the need for the youth of the country to work 70-hours a week, recently said that Indians are good at applying ideas generated elsewhere for the betterment of the nation. He also added that it would take time for the country to invent new things.
He may be right. The most recent Ola’s Krutrim model is just a replica of OpenAI’s model, simply moulded for Indian use cases. This is similar to Flipkart copying Amazon, Ola copying Uber, and Zomato and Swiggy copying DoorDash.
Meanwhile, there are other quick commerce companies such as Zepto and Dunzo, which are completely new concepts and are thriving in India.
Recently, Kunal Shah, the founder of CRED, posted on X saying that early stage startups should be easy to iterate and late stage startups should be hard to distract. This also highlights the mentality of Indian startups that are not iterating and not innovative as well. “Startups should be easy to unlearn,” replied Vivian.
The sentiment that India has been lagging when it comes to building technology and leveraging AI has grown stronger. “The reality of India is that at this point of time, by and large, we have upgraded ourselves to the orbit of applying ideas and concepts that are invented outside India and do some innovation and become experts,” Murthy said, while also adding that it is the first step towards catching up with the West.
Murthy is positive that India will be able to invent new things, but it would take time, and the youth has to be enthusiastic about it. “Because my own belief is that a youngster of today is at least 10-20 times smarter than what I was at their age.”
A lot practical though
Though this may sound like a negative take on India’s innovation, applying global ideas locally is a smart and practical approach. “It’s a strategy that accelerates innovation and progress, leveraging collective human knowledge to solve problems faster,” said a user on X.
One of the reasons that India’s AI is a little bleak is that there is a lack of investment when compared to the West, along with a lack of industry and academia partnership. If this happens, it would create a pathway for more research and development within the country, which still seems to be lacking.
A similar conversation recently occurred when experts from the Indian tech community said that there was nothing foundational being built out of India. Most of the research was just copy and paste from the West.
“Who has challenged the original algorithm? While Transformers are a great piece, they have flaws in terms of compute and carbon,” said Nikhil Malhotra, global head-Makers Lab, Tech Mahindra, reiterating that most of the research in India is done on fine-tuned models.
“Training something from scratch and turning it into the 10th best foundation model that no one will use in production is the wealth only a few companies with deep pockets can afford… even spending millions on failed training runs,” said Pratik Desai, adding that India has so many unique use cases that don’t need foundational model research and using models such as Phi, Orca, or Llama is enough.
“India has never led any fundamental research, but we have a golden opportunity as AI can be a levelling field,” added Desai. “However, this requires a fundamental shift from coaching and academia to a change in mindset from parents, and founders to investors.”
On the other hand, “If we don’t work on our own AI infrastructure, in the next 5-10 years, like we import oil, we will have to import AI,” said Gaurav Aggarwal, who is currently leading an AI initiative at Jio. He added that it pains him to see that India is not producing AI experts, just “slightly glorified engineers” who have no clue about what they are building.
Similar thoughts were recently shared by Dharmesh BA, founder of a stealth startup. He said that though a lot of people are building AI, it is most likely a wrapper of GPT. “We live in an era where it’s easy to build but difficult to figure out what to build,” he added.
What is the problem?
The possible reasons behind India not inventing new things, as pointed out by several users on X, is the lack of risk-taking attitude, and our over-reliance on the traditional system of education. Meanwhile, some say that there are merits in being a second-mover, but India definitely needs to up its game.
There have been several theories floating around the internet claiming that India has arrived late to the AI party. Even with the alleged late arrival, most of the AI development in India is focused around building AI use cases by adopting AI models developed by the western countries, rather than the core technology.
Sourav Das, researcher at IIIT Kalyani, had said the same thing earlier. “How many of them have made an algorithm, theory, or model from scratch,” he questioned, saying that everything is available on the internet and the researchers are just exploiting the resources.
“There is no invention in India, just reusing the things that are already there,” he said, adding that all the fine-tuning is just getting “honourable mentions”.
A lot of the current AI development is being driven by young developers building AI models on top of existing ones such as LLaMA and Mistral, but nothing concrete has come up yet.
Though there are initiatives such as Ola’s Krutrim, Sarvam AI, Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus, and BharatGPT that are focused on building models from scratch, a lot of work still needs to be done.
