How can India build AI like ChatGPT? By doing what Mark Zuckerberg is doing

India Today

6 hours ago

There are times when we get epoch-defining technologies. Fire, wheel, manufacturing of paper, steam engine, antibiotics, printing press, telegram, electricity, airplanes, silicon chips, WWW. It has happened again and again, and while the bar is high, and most of the time, the next big thing is merely hype, breakthroughs do happen. The generative AI feels like this epoch-defining technology. It is not perfect, but it is the beginning of something. AI will embed itself in our lives to become a layer on top of which the world will move. It is the potency of this idea that has started an arms race among tech companies, and not just companies but among countries.advertisementYet, when we say countries, we are mostly talking about two: the US and China. I would love to see another name there — India.In 2017, I headed to Google I/O, which resulted in this piece titled I/O 2017 shows Google is no longer a search company, it's an AI company. I spent my 15-hour flight reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Unlike the Sapiens, which looked at humanity's past, this one tried to imagine human affairs in the coming years. Harari made a number of observations in that book. One has stayed with me ever since that flight. 'In the early twenty-first century, the train of progress is again pulling out of the station,' Harari wrote. 'This will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo Sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance.'advertisement
We are already beginning to see that some of this is happening. Over the last few decades, technologies, including military tech, have coalesced around a few places. One is obviously Silicon Valley. Then there are a few Chinese and other Asian cities. But it is the generative AI, such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which is truly going to accelerate the trend. The potential inherent in modern AI, when combined with enough compute and robotics, is such that it will fundamentally alter the world. And this is without taking into account where it ends up going. Even if all the AI development freezes right now and there is no new technology breakthrough, even then we already have enough in terms of core tech to remake the world.Obviously, it's not going to freeze at the moment. The world - or at least some US and Chinese companies - is racing towards creating AI systems that would be as good as humans, or better, at most tasks. The race towards AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - is real and so is the risk that whoever gets to AGI first will zoom ahead of everyone else for perpetuity. This is the reason why Harari also warned in Homo Deus that 'in the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.'advertisementWhat has this got to do with Mark Zuckerberg? Unlike OpenAI or Google, or even DeepSeek, his company Meta has not exactly been an AI pioneer so far. Precisely. That is why we need to talk about Mark Zuckerberg.In the last few months — I am assuming around the time Meta launched its lacklustre Llama 4 in April — Zuckerberg decided that this was it. He woke up, and as they say in Gram, chose violence. Now Zuckerberg is personally assembling a team of crack AI researchers. It is as if he believes that nothing else matters in the future except AI, that without a good AI system in place, his companies like Meta and WhatsApp will not only miss the train but will wither.Not only has Zuckerberg decided to build a crack team of AI researchers, he has decided to build it irrespective of the cost. No cost is too high. Pissing off people is okay, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is seemingly pissed off at how aggressively Zuckerberg is trying to poach his people. In the last few weeks, there have been 10s of top OpenAI engineers who have left the company for Zuckerberg's team. This includes Trapit Bansal, an IITian who was supposedly a key figure at OpenAI.advertisementThere are reports that not only is Zuck handpicking his hires, he is also throwing an unimaginable amount of money at each of them. The reported salaries run into tens of millions - Rs 80 crore to Rs 400 crore. Some chosen ones are likely getting over a hundred million. This comes just days after Meta acqui-hired, a process where a company buys another one just to get people working in it, by putting in $14 billion for 49 per cent stake in an AI company called ScaleAI.It is possible that Zuckerberg's efforts may come to naught. Or he may succeed. We don't know. Even Zuckerberg wouldn't know. But he wants to take a swing. And what a swing he is taking! The way he is going about building an AI system after falling behind has some lessons for India.The Indian government should be taking a lead in developing AGI. But so contested is the scene right now, majorly for AI researchers, that merely talking about it is not going to cut it. It needs a plan and a willingness to push for it irrespective of the cost. Most significantly, it needs infrastructure and people. India has neither.advertisementHere is a sobering fact: Zuckerberg just spent $14 billion to get a handful of AI researchers, whereas the Indian government is hoping to spend a little over $1 billion in five years on AI. This is according to our 2024 Budget. This year, in the Budget, AI merely got a passing reference and an allocation of around Rs 500 crore, a figure that is likely less than what Mark Zuckerberg has offered top AI researchers.When I look at what companies and governments in the US and China are doing, I find India's AI rhetoric empty. Beyond platitudes and empty words, India has not made any serious attempt to get on the AI train. Now, it risks missing it. We have a few startups. Krutim and Sarvam AI come to mind. But these are not a patch on what the likes of Zuckerberg are cooking. At the same time, India's IT giants are happy doing what they always do — bureaucratic SAAS and coolie like IT service work without ever thinking about deep tech and fundamental technologies.advertisementIn 2023, while Sam Altman was visiting India, he ruffled feathers by saying that it was impossible for India, or Indian companies, to build something like ChatGPT. He knew what would be needed to build a top-class AI system. For AGI, India would need infrastructure and an ecosystem that it currently doesn't have. This ecosystem can only be enabled and created by the government. It's the same with people.The Indian government needs to reach out to AI engineers and researchers and somehow convince them to build AGI in India. It needs to do what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, which is writing emails and bringing people on board. In other words, India needs its AI Manhattan Project to get AGI or an AI system comparable to what OpenAI, Google or China's DeepSeek have. Nothing less will do.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)