Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas ‘ready to invest $1 million’ in India, says country ‘capable of ISRO-like feat in AI too’ – Trending News

Aravind Srinivas, Founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, believes that India should focus on achieving an ISRO-like feat in the field of AI, rather than just building use cases on top of large language models (LLM).

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Srinivas said, “I am ready to invest a $1mn personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI. Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and obsessed like DeepSeek team and has to open source the models with MIT license.” 

His proposal was met with widespread support from netizens, with some even calling it “the most patriotic thing an Indian has done for India.”

I am ready to invest a $1mm personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI. Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and… https://t.co/g6ItsPL0uc

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 22, 2025

Earlier, Srinivas had expressed his disagreement with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s perspective on AI, specifically regarding the training of models. He emphasised the importance of developing model training skills and building on existing models to ensure that India benefits from the AI revolution.

In a previous post, Srinivas wrote, “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. But India must show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feet for AI.”

He further explained that Elon Musk appreciates ISRO’s achievements not just for their cost-effectiveness but because they demonstrate the ability to deliver results efficiently. 

“I think that’s possible for AI, given the recent achievements of 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 added.  

While Srinivas acknowledged that he is not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like company in India, he expressed his willingness to support any team that is dedicated enough to pursue this goal and open-source their AI models.

This response follows Nandan Nilekani’s comments in October 2024, where he advised Indian AI startups to focus on practical AI applications rather than creating large language models (LLMs).

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