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Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, has recently stepped up his focus on India’s AI ambitions and has now pledged to invest $1 million and 5 hours a week to help the country achieve greatness in AI.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Srinivas wrote, “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 obsessed like DeepSeek team and has to open source the models with MIT license.”
“And beating DeepSeek R1 on all benchmarks with rigor will mean I will invest $10mm more.” the Perplexity AI CEO added.
What is Srinivas proposing?
Srinivas wrote a series of posts on Tuesday, starting with criticizing Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s stance that India should ignore building large language models (LLMs) in favour of building compute, infrastructure and AI cloud.
The Perplexity AI CEO said that Nilekani is “wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both.”
He later went on to add that India has fell in a trap thinking that AI models would take a lot of money to train but the recent landmarks of China’s DeepSeek AI reveal that’s not the case. Srinivas also wished that India changes its stance on AI models and focuses on building “muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks”.
The Indian-born entrepreneur noted that while he is not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like the company, he is happy to help anyone “obsessed enough to do it and open-source the models.”
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