Google Research India head disagrees with Nandan Nilekani, says India must build LLMs
Google Research India head Manish Gupta has disagreed with Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani's comments that ‘India should not invest in building foundational models.’
Gupta, speaking at the Bengaluru Tech Summit held between November 19-21, firmly disagreed with Nilekani and said, “There’s a technologist that I deeply respect, Nandan Nilekani, who made this statement: India should forget about foundation model building, just focus on the use cases. And I would say, with the person I respect, I respectfully disagree.” Nilekani is credited with helming world's largest unique identity programme with Aadhaar.
The Google research head countered, saying India should invest in foundational AI models or Large Language Models (LLMs). “I think he’s (Nandan Nilekani) wrong because he’s not preaching what he has practised. What he did, he revolutionised India’s technology landscape by starting with the basics for Aadhaar. He didn’t start with use cases. He started with foundations. So, I think we must start with foundations.”
Nilekani's comments came at Meta’s Build with AI summit in Bengaluru in October, where he said, “Our goal should not be to build one more LLM. Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it to create synthetic data, build small language models quickly, and train them using appropriate data.” The Infosys Chairman’s idea is that India must create infrastructure for collecting the right data and making the country “use case capital of AI globally.”
Gupta, on
