Fortune India 40 Under 40: We must catch up in the AI race, says Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI

It is imperative for India to catch up in the AI race, and it should make a sincere, wholehearted effort to do so in a technology that is as critical as space technology, said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam AI. 

Kumar was talking at a fireside conversation, ‘AI: Made in India’, at Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 awards event. “We are the fourth largest country, in terms of economy, and we should definitely have these bets, right? That’s one thing I worry a lot about,” he said. He gave the example of Grok, the generative AI chatbot of Elon Musk, which has over 100,000 GPUs. Sarvam AI, on the other hand, has 4,000 GPUs with certain support from the government. “We are very behind, and these are small efforts for a large country with the economic might we have; we should be more ambitious in what we do in R&D,” he added.

The Co-founder of Sarvam AI also exhorted the gathered leaders of different companies to reinvest more of the earned money into R&D. “R&D is a dart out there. Sometimes it might fail, but what fraction of our companies are we putting in terms of profit back into R&D? That is abysmal,” he said. 

Kumar also talked about how Generative AI consumers should not make a false choice between what is high quality and what is Indian, especially in the context of how some of the larger companies in the Gen AI space have the wherewithal to market their products in a better way. “They should only adopt things which are of the highest quality, right? I don’t think businesses can be built sustainably with that imperative,” he said. This, according to Kumar, implies that India should innovate on top of the other models. 

Innovation should come with the use case in mind for the citizens. “The fact that we are here in India, we understand our users better. Our focus should be on closing that gap to actually creating voice value positive experiences,” he said.