Indian tech majors, including Tech Mahindra, Zoho Corp and Tata Consultancy Services, could be developing generative artificial intelligence-based platforms to rival Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.

While Zoho has said it is building a GPT-like alternative which will be a large language model under the direct supervision of founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu, Tech Mahindra has created an “AI think tank” which is already in action working with the academia and government officials to figure out how AI can be applied to boost innovation.

These disclosures came days after Altman said it was quite hopeless for a team in India to build a foundational AI model on a limited budget that will be similar to OpenAI. Altman’s remarks sparked immediate backlash, especially on Twitter, as netizens admonished the tech leader for doubting the capabilities of the Indian tech ecosystem.

Building on base

However, given that OpenAI operates with a kitty of over $11 billion and has decades of research behind it, there are experts that side with Altman’s camp as well — which is, it will be a mistake to direct Indian AI innovation to build alternatives to western models from scratch instead of further building upon global AI innovation.

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Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst and CEO of Greyhound Research, said, “The history of innovation in AI has followed an industry-wide approach. Even for companies globally, collaboration between tech giants has been the key. In fact, the roots for OpenAI lie in the strides companies like Google, IBM made in natural language processing and other areas over the past decades.”

“The idea is not to compete with Open AI, but to build on it, find its limitations and foster innovation there,” Gogia said.

Keeping pace

While Altman’s comments have ignited a public maelstrom of East versus West for AI innovation — IT giants like TCS and Infosys have been silently keeping pace, incorporating the technology with their end-to-end solutions. While Infosys has been an early investor in OpenAI, investing $1 billion in the then not-for-profit in 2015, TCS has incorporated IBM’s AI platform, Watson, into its AI solutions in recent years.

In a recent interview with businessline, TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam had said the company is developing low-code no-code solutions for app development using GPT-like technology.

“It will be wrong to direct investment and interest into AI as the ‘flavor of the quarter’; it will take years and decades of research and money to build equal or better alternatives. A better direction, which is already being followed by a lot of companies in India, is to further build upon the global AI ecosystem and develop monetisable use cases,” Gogia said.

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