Aravind Srinivas the CEO of Perplexity AI has come up with a revolutionary plan for India in the sector of Artificial Intelligence. The 31 year old entrepreneur promised to invest $1 million of his own money and give 5 hours a week of his time to any qualified team that he thinks can make India the top in AI. In a series of emotional posts on X, Srinivas stated that India should first focus on developing AI models and not just applications as he put it.
Srinivas assured that he would fund any team that is innovative, even comparing them to the high performing DeepSeek team and said the models should be open source under an MIT license. Raising the stakes he added that if any team comes up which is better than the Chinese AI giant DeepSeek then he would invest an additional $10 million.
The Perplexity CEO criticized Indian tech leaders like Nandan Nilekani for advising startups to focus on developing AI applications rather than on top notch large language models (LLMs). He said that India is repeating a costly mistake, underestimating its capability to train models efficiently.
Comparing the development of AI models to ISRO’s achievements in space exploration Srinivas urged India to build AI models that are world class and oriented towards Indic languages. Srinivas expressed the hope that India would come up with a more positive and forward thinking approach and develop a strong AI ecosystem to support its global ambitions.
