Should India Shift its Focus from LLMs to Large Concept Models?
While many believe India has missed the GenAI bus, jumping on Large Concept Models (LCMs), the next emerging technology, could present a unique opportunity for the country to explore. LCM technology, still at its nascent stage, exhibits characteristics that could help solve complex problems and be a game-changer for India to lead the AI race. But is this the right move? Should India invest in LCMs? Is it a bad idea? Do experts believe there is a better option? The LLM Race is Tough Enough Even though India is leading the charge in AI agents, it is incredibly tough to compete for a leading spot in terms of a foundational model as we know it. Solutions like AI4Bharat and Ola’s Krutrim, among others, have made headlines. Several startups in India are working on AI-powered solutions to automate mundane tasks and have been doing exceptionally well. Despite all this, India is not leading the race, and the reason is lack of capital. Mohandas Pai, head of Aarin Capital and former CFO of Infosys, spoke to AIM last year about this when asked about the lack of innovation from Indian IT. “Who will give $200 million to a startup in India to build an LLM?” he wondered. “Why is nothing like Mistral coming from India? There is nobody…Creating an LLM or a big AI model requires large capital, time, a huge computing facility, and a market. All of which India does not have,” he further said. At a quick glance, many leading LLMs stand out, with countless others joining the list every other day. With India entering the AI race, it may not be an outright “aha moment.” Language Concept Models Are Unexplored, But Is It Useful? Large Concept Models (LCMs) are in the nascent stages of development. However, as the research paper by Meta explains, they could have immense benefits for India. LCMs are language and modality agnostic, meaning they could work well for all diverse language and cultural complexes in India without special efforts. It uses a sentence embedding space, SONAR (Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations), which supports 200 languages, including Hindi, Kannada, and more. The architecture behind an LCM allows it to tackle complex problems (advanced reasoning) better than LLMs, as it emphasises semantic understanding, hierarchical processing, reasoning, and planning. It also supports a larger context length by default because the smallest unit here is a “sentence” or a concept. They are also excellent at document summarisation and interactive content creation, as explained in ADaSci’s blog titled ‘A Deep Dive into Large Concept Models (LCMs)’. So, by shifting their focus from LLMs to LCMs, Indian companies could choose to eliminate putting efforts into Indic language models, discover a new way to reduce computational costs, and tackle complex problems in the country. Will This Help India in the AI Race? While the tech speaks for itself, India recently received a significant boost with a ₹2,000 crore investment in Budget 2025 for the IndiaAI mission. With this in mind, AIM spoke to Amlan Panigrahi, a GenAI engineer at Deloitte, about this idea. “I feel rather than investing in LCMs, which is an initiative of Meta, India should focus on investing in existing Sovereign AI initiatives to solve the nation’s problems first. Entities like Sarvam.AI, OdiaLlama and Indic language models should be targeted more to strengthen the foundation of the country in AI,” he said. He also mentioned that exploring Graph Transformers could be a novel and impactful research direction, as it has the potential to solve contemporary industry problems. Bilal Yoosuf, a senior consultant in data science and engineering at TNP India, spoke to AIM and shared his thoughts, which resonated with a similar sentiment, “India still has a huge opportunity to explore LLMs, especially in the social sector, before shifting focus to LCMs.” “A major part of the population hasn’t even accessed GenAI yet. With the government’s new AI investments, prioritising LLMs for regional languages, education, healthcare, and governance could create a real impact. Once we build strong AI solutions for our own people, we can then look at leading the next wave of AI innovation globally,” Yoosuf added. On the other side, experts like Utsav Khandelwal from Maxim AI believe that by investing early in LCM research, India could position itself as a leader in next-gen AI and mirror its success with cost-effective space missions like ISRO’s. LCM is an uncharted territory for most of the world. It remains to be seen when an AI researcher from India picks it up and explores what it can do for India.
Large Concept Models could be the next big thing. Could it be a good idea for India to go all in?
Large Concept Models could be the next big thing. Could it be a good idea for India to go all in?
["Large Language models"]
["data science", "Go", "GenAI", "API", "AI", "Large Language models", "innovation", "ML", "Transformers", "Aim", "R"]
["AI", "ML", "data science", "GenAI", "Aim", "Transformers", "R", "Go", "API", "innovation"]
I am a tech aficionado and a computer science graduate with a keen interest in AI, Coding, Open Source, and Cloud. Have a tip? Reach out to ankush.das@aimmediahouse.com