‘$1 million, 5 hours a week’: Perplexity’s Indian-origin CEO’s pledge for India’s AI revolution | Trending

Jan 22, 2025 05:36 PM Indian-origin CEO Aravind Srinivas promises $10 million investment if his team outperforms China’s DeepSeek in AI benchmarks. Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI Aravind Srinivas has promised a bold investment for progressing artificial intelligence in India. The 31-year-old has offered to invest $ 1 million and offer five hours a week of his time to any qualified group of people who can “make Indian great again” for AI. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, made a passionate pitch for developing more AI training models in India.(AFP) In a series of posts on X, he made a passionate pitch for developing more AI training models in India instead of just focusing on AI applications. “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,” he said, detailing the conditions of his investment. Take a look at the post here: He also added that if the team can beat the recent achievements of the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek on all benchmarks he would invest $10 million more. Aravind Srinivas hits out at Nandan NilekaniThe Indian-origin CEO had previously criticised Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani over his stance on AI after Nilekani advised Indian AI startups to focus on practical AI applications instead of working on building large language models (LLMs). Calling for more AI models to be built in India, the AI CEO said that India is committing the same make he committed. “I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a ton of money to train,” he said. He said that India must work on the AI development front like ISRO has done for space exploration, pointing out appreciation SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for the Indian space agency. “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,” he wrote in a long post. (Also read: Indian-origin CEO hits out at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani over AI: ‘He is wrong’) Recommended Topics News / Trending / ‘$1 million, 5 hours a week’: Perplexity’s Indian-origin CEO’s pledge for India’s AI revolution See Less