Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has doubled down on his call to bring about India’s AI prowess, announcing his personal commitment of $1 million and five hours per week to the right team.
Srininvas’s tweet emphasized the need for a group of qualified individuals dedicated to developing AI models that rival the best — an endeavor he likened to the achievements of ISRO.
The Indian-origin AI leader named two primary conditions for this commitment: the selected team must be as “cracked and obsessed” as the innovators behind China’s DeepSeek, and any resulting models must be open-sourced under an MIT license.
His motivation stems from a belief that India should not shy away from the AI race due to cost concerns, echoing sentiments he previously shared challenging the thoughts of industry stalwart Nandan Nilekani .
Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, has argued against India sinking large investments into developing its own large language models (LLMs).
The Infoysys co-founder favors channeling resources into AI cloud infrastructure and leveraging existing models. Supporting this stance, TCS CEO Krithivasan pointed out opportunities in regional applications using existing LLMs.
However, Srinivas remains adamant about India’s potential to produce globally competitive AI solutions without excessive financial burdens, drawing parallels to ISRO’s resource-efficient space achievements.
He had earlier shown his commitment by proposing free Perplexity Pro licenses for Indian researchers and students, indicating a continuous effort to push for India’s participation in foundational AI development.
Srinivas’s offer also comes at a time when AI race is heating up among countries. Just an hour ago, I reported on the $500 billion initiative by OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia with the aim of cementing US leadership in AI.
China’s DeepSeek meanwhile is making waves with its open-source models that are rivaling the benchmarks of some of the best generative AI models made in the U.S.
India, meanwhile, is yet to even enter the race in any meaningful way.