Indian-origin CEO hits out at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani over AI: ‘He is wrong’

Perplexity AI's Aravind Srinivas challenged Nandan Nilekani's views on AI, advocating for India to develop its own models.

Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI Aravind Srinivas has criticised Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani over his stance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and suggested that he was wrong in asking Indians to focus on only one aspect of the technology.

Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas called Nilekani "awesome" and said his efforts with Infosys and UPI were unmatched.

In a post on X, the Perplexity AI CEO started out by calling Nilekani "awesome" and said his efforts with Infosys and UPI were unmatched contributions to the nation. However, he also flagged his efforts to push Indians to ignore AI model training skills.

"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," he said.

Srinivas' response comes after Nandan Nilekani had advised Indian AI startups to focus on practical AI applications instead of working on building large language models (LLMs).

'Fell into same trap as I did'

Calling for more AI models to be built in India, the 31-year-old CEO said that India is committing the same mistake 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 by 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.