‘Winners in AI will be those who meet customers where they are,’ says Nandan Nilekani
In a keynote address at the “Making an Adbhut India” event hosted by People+AI, Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder and chairman of Infosys, said that India’s approach to AI will be different from the global trend of building LLMs. Instead, India will focus on building AI use-cases that will reach every citizen. “Indian path in AI is different. We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM, let people with capital, let people who want to pedal ships do all that stuff… We are here to make a difference and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people,” he said. Nilekani added that India’s advantage lies in its population and aspirations, and that the country should not wait for the next $10-trillion model but should rather use the technology available today to solve the challenges of its billion-people resources. “Our advantage is our population and their aspiration. This is why we have to bring down the cost of inference from Rs 100 to 1 Rupee” he said, adding that winners in AI in India will be those who meet customers where they are. He also took a jab at AI enthusiasts and companies that talk about AI and its extinction effect, saying that “a lot of these doomsday prophets are essentially protectionists, who don’t want to allow other people to build models, they want to make all the money for themselves.” The event, hosted by People+AI, an initiative of the not-for-profit EkStep Foundation, also saw the launch of the Open Cloud Compute (OCC) project, which aims to establish an open network for compute resources, addressing the growing demand for AI infrastructure. Other highlights of the event included the launch of Sesame, India’s first LLM specifically designed for the banking, financial services, and insurance sector, developed in collaboration with indigenous AI research firm Sarvam AI. The fintech company Setu also showcased its chat-based personal finance product, which uses AI to provide personalised financial services to customers. The event also saw the launch of BharatDiffusion v2, a diffusion-based AI model designed to create images that reflect India’s culture. The model has been trained on a large collection of Indian photos to produce high-quality and realistic pictures. In addition, the event featured the launch of JOHNAIC, a personal AI server built by Von Neumann AI. The one-time investment “cloud in a box” solution claims to slash AI costs by 85 percent and comes with in-built SaaS and AI tools to run SMEs and startups. People+AI is the first customer of JOHNAIC and is using it for its own AI requirements while keeping its data private. The event also saw the launch of STAGE, an entertainment platform for India’s regional cultures serving the Haryanvi and Rajasthani cultures, which recently turned profitable with over 1.2 million paying subscribers. The platform features India’s first Haryanvi-dialect based AI voice agent.
“Our advantage is our population and their aspiration. This is why we have to bring down the cost of inference from Rs 100 to 1 Rupee”
Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder and chairman of Infosys, said that India's approach to AI will be different from the global trend of building LLMs.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.