Perplexity AI's Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas on Tuesday said Infosys' non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani is wrong to push Indians to ignore the artificial intelligence model training skills.
“Nandan Nilekhani is awesome, and he's done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he's wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both,” said the Perplexity AI CEO in a post on social media platform X.
Srinivas highlighted that model training skills and building on top of existing models are essential for Indians to learn and for the nation's artificial intelligence to gain from the benefits.
Although the Perplexity AI CEO appreciated Nilekani's efforts in working with Infosys and UPI to contribute a lot to the nation, he also flagged his efforts to push Indians to ignore model training skills.
Srinivas' response comes after Nandan Nilekani, in October 2024, advised Indian AI startups to stay away from building large language models (LLMs) and move towards practical AI applications instead.
Srinivas also said that India is committing the same mistake he committed while running the AI company and the thinking that the country doesn't have to build its own AI models is wrong.
India thinks that training its artificial intelligence foundation models will cost a lot of money, the CEO pointed out.
“Re India training its foundation models debate: I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a shit ton of money to train,” said Srinivas in his post.
Highlighting India's forward stance in the space technology sector and the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) achievements, he said it's time for the nation to show the world that it is capable of doing the same for artificial intelligence.
The 31-year-old CEO also cited billionaire and space tech innovator Elon Musk's appreciation of ISRO. Musk had said the Indian space agency's accomplishments showed how more could be achieved by spending less.
“Elon Musk appreciated ISRO (not even Blue Origin) because he respects when people can get stuff done by not spending a lot. That's how he operates,” said Srinivas.
According to Srinivas, India can achieve this on the AI front with efforts to build muscle to train its AI models not only in Indic languages but also at a global scale, noting the recent achievements of the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek.
“So, I hope India changes its stance from wanting to reuse models from open-source and instead trying to build muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks,” he said.
Aravind Srinivas said he is not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like business for India, but he is happy to “help anyone obsessed enough to do it and open-source the models”.
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