Global AI Conclave: India will be at a disadvantage if it doesn’t join the LLM race, says General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja

Hemant Taneja, CEO and Managing Director of General Catalyst in conversation with Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor of CNBC-TV18.

In the long term, India will be at a disadvantage if it does not build its own large language model (LLM), Hemant Taneja, CEO and Managing Director of General Catalyst, one of the most prominent venture capital (VC) firms, said while speaking at the CNBC-TV18 & Moneycontrol Global AI Conclave 2024.

“If you take the long view, and say that you’re not going to have your intelligence infrastructure or compute infrastructure, that problem is going to keep perpetuating. I do think India needs to think about its own infrastructure. All the way from semiconductors to foundational models,” Taneja said.

His view is at odds with what notable Indian tech leaders have maintained.

Nandan Nilekani, Infosys chairman and Aadhaar architect, speaking at a recent industry event said, “Let other people build LLMs, we will make sure it works for people.”

“Our goal should not be to build one more LLM. Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it to create synthetic data, build small language models quickly, and train them using appropriate data,” he added.

LLM is an advanced AI system trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language. It can answer questions, write text, and assist with tasks by predicting words based on context.

The rationale given is that LLMs are capital-intensive and require years of development—an area where companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and other tech giants have already invested substantial time and resources in recent years.

Taneja also said, in India, there is a shortage of engineers who know how to use AI and that new categories need to emerge.

Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy also cited India’s lack of problem-solving abilities in certain technologies, adding that the country should not yet invest in building its own large language models (LLMs).

“We have not been able to build large databases, and without big data, AI (artificial intelligence) has no value. A large language model (LLM) doesn't make any sense. Basically, the Indian mindset is still not oriented towards problem definition and problem-solving,” Murthy had said in an interview with Moneycontrol earlier.