‘Ready to invest $1M and 5 hours per week to make India great in AI’: Perplexity AI CEO
Srinivas further stated that surpassing DeepSeek R1, an AI reasoning model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, “on all benchmarks with rigor” would prompt him to invest an additional $10 million.
As the global race for artificial intelligence heats up, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of has pledged a personal investment of $1 million and five hours of weekly commitment to fuel AI efforts in India.
“I am ready to invest $1 million 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,” wrote Srinivas in a post on X.
He further stated that surpassing DeepSeek R1, an AI reasoning model developed by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, “on all benchmarks with rigor” would prompt him to invest an additional $10 million.
DeepSeek R1 is known for its capabilities in logical inference, mathematical problem-solving, and real-time decision-making.
The 2022 born startup, known for its AI-powered search engine and chatbot, leverages advanced technologies like natural language processing and machine learning.
The startup, competing with rivals such as OpenAI, secured $500 million in its fourth funding round last December, tripling its valuation to $9 billion.
The founder recently 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.
“To be clear: Nandan Nilekani 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,” he said.
These comments were made in a follow-up post on the social media platform X, following an initial post by Srinivas.
“Re India training its foundation models debate: I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a shit 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 said.
Amid these developments, US President Donald Trump has announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion with the launch of 'Stargate'— a joint venture between OpenAI and SoftBank to build data centres and create over 1,00,000 jobs in the country.
The project will be initially funded by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX, with SoftBank and OpenAI serving as primary partners. SoftBank will oversee financial responsibilities, while OpenAI will handle operations. Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, will take on the role of chairman.
Reacting to the announcement, Pratik Desai, Founder of KissanAI, shed light on the contrasting scenario in India. “The world is going all in, while in India, we are still debating if we should go for frontier models or not,” read his post.
Edited by Jyoti Narayan