Global AI Conclave: Unlikely to invest in companies that are building LLMs, says Premji Invest’s TK Kurien

T K Kurien, CEO and Managing Partner at Premji Invest in conversation with Moneycontrol's Chandra R Srikanth

Wipro founder-chairman Azim Premji’s fund Premji Invest is not likely to invest in companies that are building large language models (LLMs) because the existing firms have already trained their models and there is very little incremental work left to be done.

“Most of the large models have pretty much taken all the data that is out there on the internet and absorbed it into the model. The training part is all over,” TK Kurien said while speaking at the CNBC-TV18 & Moneycontrol Global AI Conclave 2024 on November 22.

Now, post-training and inferencing will become two main areas of focus but that trend we’re yet to see, as per TK Kurien. “The biggest change coming is inferencing in AI. We haven't seen that happening at scale. We have done a lot of investment in inferencing, which we haven't announced yet,” he said.

“My prediction is that, in the next 10 years, core LLMs will get relegated into labs,” 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.

TK Kurien, formerly the CEO of Wipro, speaks after having backed some of the hottest AI startups globally. From Paris-based Poolside to Canva and Galileo to Hippocratic AI, Premji holds shares in several AI startups.

His views line up with what other Indian tech leaders maintain.

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.

However, it is at odds with what large global investors think.

“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,” Hemant Taneja, CEO and Managing Director of General Catalyst, said while adding that India will be at a disadvantage if it doesn’t join the LLM race.

India and the US

India’s AI ecosystem will be as mature as the US over the coming years, as per TK Kurien. Premji Invest has a 17-member team in the US who identify global bets for the investor.

Asked what would make the fund back more AI companies in India, and what more needs to be done, TK Kurien said, “We already have conviction, India is the services capital of the world. It’s really about finding those 1-2 founders who can build scaled businesses behind it, who come from the services side. We’ve not found them yet – we have found one or two, but scaling them is the problem we are contending with.”

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