Today in AI: Razorpay's Harshil Mathur believes AI will change the system, large AI models will never be free and more

(Image: Moneycontrol)

Investors in India prioritise revenue over asset building: Vinod Khosla

Deep tech sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), biotechnology, and molecular discovery have particularly seen an academic push in India in recent years.

• Government budgets for research and development are low for deep-tech investing, while funding from the private equity and venture capital ecosystem has also been low.
• To put this in perspective, overall funding to technology companies had fallen to $46.7 billion in 2022, down nearly 40 percent from the previous year.

Large AI Models: Their huge costs mean there’s going to be no free AI

Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bard burn a lot of cash in chip acquisition and various operational costs.

• A very significant aspect of why it took so long to publicly deploy powerful generative AI systems is the humongous cost associated with training and deploying them.
• Due to the steep cost profile of large AI systems, the first implication is that the public almost never gets access to the latest and greatest. This is because high quality, larger size of output, and lower latency for processing requests, are all antithetical to mass adoption.

Razorpay's Harshil Mathur says "AI will touch every aspect of the entire ecosystem"

Mathur also expects AI to transform customer service in the coming years.

• Talking about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the payment gateway industry, Mathur said, "We, at Razorpay, are looking to add AI in the risk and data-security area where we need to build products to control frauds," he said.
• Mathur highlighted the significant cost of technology as the most substantial expense for payment players. While marketing and advertising costs are relatively low, investments in technology infrastructure, research and development (R&D), and human resources remain the biggest line items, he said.