India shouldn’t build another LLM: Nandan Nilekani

BENGALURU: Nandan Nilekani said he stands by his view that India need not spend resources building another large language model (LLM). He was responding to a question from us on the view expressed recently by Google Research India director Manish Gupta that India will benefit from building a foundation model.
“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,” he said.
Foundation models like the ones that OpenAI and Meta are building often cost billions of dollars because they are being trained on vast amounts of data using very expensive infrastructure.
Nilekani has in the past stressed that India should focus on building use cases for AI on top of the LLMs that are available globally.
Last month, Gupta had said at the Bengaluru Tech Summit that he “respectfully disagreed” with Nilekani’s advice on prioritising use case building over building foundation models around AI. “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,” he said.