6 December 2024

Winning the AI race with research talent

Anirudh Suri

The recent visits of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Yann LeCun didn’t just highlight the importance of the Indian market to artificial intelligence (AI) majors. It made clear that India needs top-tier AI research talent — and not just AI infrastructure — if it wants to become an AI power and make its National AI Mission a success.

Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, spoke at various educational institutions including IIT Delhi and IIT Chennai, among others. LeCun, winner of the Turing Prize in 2018, urged India to enhance its participation in the global AI research community, and not focus only on AI product development. A dearth of cutting-edge research opportunities in AI, and brain drain (of some of India’s best AI research talent), he pointed out, are among the primary challenges for India to build its own AI expertise.

In contrast, when they shared the stage at the Nvidia AI Summit last month, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani emphasised building affordable AI infrastructure for India. But surprisingly, Jensen made almost no mention of the criticality of top-tier research talent for India. Their emphasis on AI infrastructure is in line with the weight India has placed on compute infrastructure in its National AI Mission (NAIM), with half of the Mission’s funds allocated towards it.

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