Nandan Nilekani's Stance on India's AI Investment

BENGALURU: Nandan Nilekani reiterated his view that India should not allocate resources to building another large language model (LLM). Responding to recent comments by Google Research India director Manish Gupta, who argued that India would benefit from developing its own foundation model, Nilekani emphasized the importance of focusing on other AI-related investments.

"Foundation models are not the best use of your money. If India has $50 billion to spend, it should use that to build compute, infrastructure, and AI cloud. These are the raw materials and engines of this game," Nilekani stated.

Foundation models, like those being developed by OpenAI and Meta, often require billions of dollars due to the extensive data and expensive infrastructure needed for training. Nilekani has previously advocated for India to concentrate on building AI use cases on top of globally available LLMs.

In contrast, Gupta had expressed his disagreement with Nilekani's approach at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, suggesting that India should follow a similar path to Nilekani's Aadhaar initiative by first establishing a strong foundation before developing use cases. "He is not preaching what he practised. He revolutionised India's technology landscape by starting with the basics. With Aadhaar, he did not start with use cases, he started with building foundations. We too must, using our constraints as ingredients for innovation," Gupta said.