Nandan Nilekani wrong about pushing India to ignore model training skills: Perplexity CEO

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI search engine firm Perplexity AI, has stated that Infosys co-founder and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani is “wrong” in suggesting that Indians should focus solely on building on existing models and ignore model training skills. 

According to Srinivas, it is essential to focus on both aspects. These comments were made in a follow-up post on the social media platform X, following an initial post by Srinivas that began with “Re India training its foundation models debate.”

“To be clear: Nandan Nilekhani is awesome, and he's done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he’s wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both,” read Srinivas’ second post.

For context, Nilekani has encouraged Indian AI startups to prioritise creating practical AI applications over building large language models (LLMs), offering a focused path for innovation.

“Our goal should not be to build one more LLM. Let the big boys in the 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 co-founder had noted, during a session at the Build with AI Summit organised by Meta in Bengaluru, in October last year.

Srinivas noted that he feels, “India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a... ton of money to train.”

“But India must show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feet for AI. Elon Musk appreciated ISRO (not even Blue Origin) because he respects when people can get stuff done by not spending a lot. That's how he operates. I think that's possible for AI, given the recent achievements of DeepSeek,” he noted.

“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. I'm not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like company for India, but I'm happy to help anyone obsessed enough to do it and open-source the models,” Srinivas added.

Founded in 2022, Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine and chatbot, which leverages advanced technologies like natural language processing and machine learning. According to the CEO, its ability to deliver real-time information sets it apart from other AI chatbots. It competes against OpenAI, which has begun rolling out search features to all ChatGPT users.

In December, Perplexity secured $500 million in its fourth funding round boosting its valuation to $9 billion, three times its previous value.