Why India lags behind in AI

He’s absolutely right. You ask any elite UG student what their northstar is and it’s usually the highest paying job. You have your outliers that go on to start unicorns but even those are nothing more than copies of American companies and models I struggle to think of an Indian company that has made something truly new and unique Scarcity mentality at its finest

We’ll be able to move mountains once we stop obsessing with IITians. They work their asses off to get into IITs to get high paying jobs, it’s as simple as that. Train tier-2,3 college students who have nothing to lose. You’ll achieve 100x more optimal results with 100x less investment.

Why this prof isn’t building cutting edge AI in India? We all know the reasons. Start with yourself prof sahib .. 🤦‍♂️

Apna pet paalega ya research karega admi baith ke. Koi paisa hi nahi de raha research ka. Major fundings are happening in Europe and USA. Phd schedule in India is horrible. People are pressurised alot in the curriculum.

Also, because of people like Bhavish Agarwal who believe playing to the tune of jingoism is going to create a popular sentiment within the country. Yesterday, he tweeted about a reply from Krutrim and ChatGPT proudly and it clearly showcased Krutrim is light years behind as well the training dataset is biased. AI models need to be fact based and not emotion based and as a country we are so governed and overwhelmed by emotions and virtue signaling that we would lap up any kind of populist idea. Tweet link for ref : https://x.com/bhash/status/1753986946827747653?s=46

Correct 100% Completed PG at IIT. Have couple of research papers in hand. Trying to go abroad. Here, the JD itself contains 3-5 categories of AI job. One person has to do data analytics, ML Engineer, ML testing as well. They want all-in-one as package of very very low as possible. It's not the case in US, Europe. Pay is very high but still they will take for a single job requirement. Here, In Simple terms: Low salary Very high work requirements

As a former researcher let me tell you the problem. The MTech scholarship is 12k pm, the JRF is 31k pm These are entry level salaries for non-elite students. And for the PhD you need to spend minimum 5 years in that salary bracket and you still won't get funding. Plus there's a lack of great computers and software in the universities. Noone gets a mac or a powerful laptop to run the numbers at the hostel. Plus publishing has a huge bias against Indians We need to overhaul the research infra before we ask students to participate. Also as a professor you're probably making 1.5l at the highest level. You get a lot of other money but that's the cap for you after 30ish years in the profession. A good software engineer makes that while starting

Is there any field where India isn't lagging? Heck,we are a billion people and play one sport,and haven't won any intl trophies in that in the last decade. Is there any field where we are the best?

If Mr. Amit Sethi wants me to work my ass off for 2-3 years to get into one of the world’s most premier colleges and end up making a fraction of what the likes of Elvish Yadav and Sourav Joshi makes then I have a bad news for him, I’m either moving abroad or killing myself.

I think we’re a generation or two behind in terms of qualified kids being able to take 0 to 1 startup risks or building something foundational in tech in India. Everyone’s in a survival mode and once a generation passes through when they get wealthy, their kids can start taking risks or think on solving problems with first principles thinking. It’ll take time cuz there’s no two ways about it. America has decades of headstart in terms of wealth and risk taking.

In indian every other company is busy in just using buzz words like ‘AI’, ‘ML’ in their product advertisement, but in reality they don’t spend 0.01% of their revenue into R&D of it Ofcourse there are few outliners

It’s about the incentives and how our people are psychologically conditioned towards maximising money. In the western society people are attuned towards building something bigger than an individual. Here we’re taught that innovation, science and technology are only means to an end not the path itself. Ask any Indian VC to fund 10 mn on just experimenting and innovating, they won’t. In the west, this culture starts from college endowments to angels to VCs . Haldiram investors can’t create a culture which incentivises risk taking in the name of innovation. For morons quoting shit like Krutim, you don’t understand the basics of venture capital in India

Tbh, Majority of the Core Research is happening in the west as of now and on top of that the Chinese are having their own scholars working in such field for a long time now (they heavily invested in the development of computer vision models to be deployed inside every inanimate object having a camera and a microphone out there)

All we need is investment in innovation instead of mediocrity. We never support doing extra work. Not all UGs want max paying job, 2nd part of point 3 can be applied for UGs as well. Most of my friends are going for PhD in US are because they have been just writing and debugging some stupid SQL since last 2-3 years.

The real number of people who can work with AI in India is probably less than 500, while the US has thousands

Then he should keep his mouth shut

Why isn't this professor producing great research work if he is the one not running behind money ?

And even the startup bro are running behind copy cat ideas and vc valuation

AI is one of the highest paid jobs, But we don't have that big investment for now because of various reasons. So people end up joining in US companies who has better capital.

totally correct. couldn't agree more. however I'd differ with EU as whole ... i have been seeing some research group in France coming up as a strong contributors. other countries...not so much though.