BL Interview. India should work on its own LLM while leveraging existing AI: Sangeet Kumar, Addverb Co-Founder

A debate on whether India should make its own LLM or just use what is already out there is going on. What is your take?

If you had asked me this question just three-four months ago, I would have said no because it is a huge cost to put together that infrastructure. There are open LLMs. But last month, DeepSeek, a Chinese company, launched its own model at $27 million. So if you do it right, you can build or pre-train a model. China’s companies do not get the best of GPUs because of the restrictions and geopolitical situations. Still, DeepSeek was able to build this, which is revolutionary. Therefore, now I feel that maybe we can work on both fronts of building application on the existing LLM and SLM, which are open today, and we do it really fast, and parallelly also develop our own LLM which, learning from what has happened, we don’t have to spend as much money and resources on.

You had said your new humanoid robot will use AI. Do you feel AI in general has helped accelerate the development in robotics?

It has absolutely accelerated robotics in a big way. Robots has been in the industry since the 1980s and mostly automotive industry but there those robots focused on movement, precision, reliability, etc. In the last 15 years, with classical AI machine learning, robots started doing unstructured work beyond that repeatability and accuracy. In the last four years, because of generative AI, it does not depend on any form factor. You keep on training the robot at an Internet-level data. These last four years have been revolutionary in terms of what robots can do and cannot do. What would have once taken 10 years in robotics, now takes only three-four months. That is what this generative AI and LLMs are enabling the robot to do.

How would you compare India’s demand for robots with other countries?

In terms of general demand, 60 per cent of revenue comes from overseas market and 40 per cent comes from India. Particularly for humanoid, if we can reduce the cost of robotics, we have a huge market where there is not enough manpower. In India, we have quick commerce where so many people deliver items to homes. But countries like Japan and Europe do not have that. Our robots run in around 25 countries and we would like to reach 100 countries in five-seven years.

Regarding your upcoming humanoid robot, when will it likely be launched and are you planning to use it for any specific sector?

We are trying our best to launch it by end of FY26. We will be able to estimate a date by, maybe, October-November.

There are three verticals which interest us. The first would be industry and warehouses, which is automotive manufacturing or warehouse where tough job needs to be performed. The second area would be in nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, chemical or pharma plants, where humans are not best placed to work in. Today, humans are forced to do those work where they are in contact with a very dangerous liquid or chemical or a very dangerous process. The third area is, of course, defence, where we are trying to build robots to help the Indian Army carry out critical works.

So will the robots take away some of the jobs?

Whenever a new technology comes in, people think they will lose jobs. But it has turned out, time and again, that new technology created so many other jobs. That happened in second industrial revolution too, when mobility came into picture and again when the third industrial revolution happened when PCs and the Internet came into the picture. These technologies do make people and society productive, the economy grows and therefore a huge number of jobs, which we don’t even know today, are created. So, I am of the firm belief of that we should not be worrying about robots taking our job.

You had set up a manufacturing company in UP. Any progress over there?

That unit is operational. We built it to reach one lakh robots a year. Right now, we’re using 15 per cent of the capacity. Hopefully, in the next three-four years, we will reach full capacity.

How has the experience been since Reliance acquisition?

It has been great. We have been building automation systems in Reliance Retail before acquisition. Since acquisition, we are working with other businesses like new energy and petrochemical. We have been able to get a technological support from large companies like NVIDIA Qualcomm, so in terms of processing, simulation, 5G, we have great support. Even the Jio AI stack, we’re trying to integrate it with our robots. We also have the support to grow our international market.