Rajan Anandan, the managing director of Peak XV Partners, said on May 17 that the goal of the Indian startup ecosystem is to build population-scale artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that can 'uplevel' humans.
Anandan made this comment at the Moneycontrol and CNBC-TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram while contrasting different strategies that startups in the Silicon Valley and India are taking when using AI to develop different products and solutions.
"If we look at Bay Area AI (companies) today, the primary focus is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)...We have a different goal. We want to uplevel humans, not build machines", Anandan said during a fireside chat.
"In India, we have 1.4 billion people. How do we make the lives of 1.4 billion Indians better by making education better, health care better, giving them more energy, and improving our sanitation systems" he said.
If one takes this lens on how to build population scale solutions that makes 1.4 billion Indians live better, and more successful, they start thinking differently, Anandan said.
To build these solutions, startups and tech companies can leverage these machines as they get better, he said. "We can use technology from whoever builds it. For foundation models, we can use existing open source models or closed models".
Anandan cited an example of robotics firm Genrobotics that is building AI-based robots that can help clean manholes.
Very early in AI evolution
Anandan said that we are still very early in the AI evolution globally. Hence, we need to take a multi-decadal view on what Indian companies can become in both generative AI and the broader artificial intelligence space.
"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that 20-30 years from now we will look and say, two out of the top five, and five out of the top 10 companies will be Indian," he said.
Highlighting the future potential of Indian tech companies, Anandan said this will not be limited to artificial intelligence but two out of the top five, and five out of the top 10 companies will be Indian companies across all sectors.
This will be because of three things - talent, large problems to solve, and the growing Indian economy.
"On the research side, we have a long way to go in terms of deep AI researchers. But if you look at the other set of talent that you need to actually build AI companies, whether it's application companies or tooling, infra companies and so on, we have talent" Anandan said.
Anandan said India also has the largest number of unsolved problems on Planet Earth. "There is no country that has more unsolved problems and startups get built when you have big problems to solve," he said.
Where is the opportunity?
Earlier this month, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani said that India will be the AI use-case capital of the world.
"The Indian path in AI is different. We are not in the arms race to build the next LLM, let people with capital, let people who want to pedal chips do all that stuff... We are here to make a difference and our aim is to give this technology in the hands of people," he said at an event hosted by People+AI in Bengaluru.
During the fireside chat, Anandan said he agreed with Nilekani's views, stating that the opportunity for Indian startups is in the application layer.
"There are a large number of opportunities for both India and building for the world," he said.
Anandan said there will be a significant number of companies that will get built using AI to build "10x better products for consumers and prosumers (a portmanteau of the words producer and consumer)"
The second opportunity is building products that will use AI to make the lives of small and medium businesses easier, he said.
Other key opportunities in the application layer include startups building enterprise solutions for different functional areas such as customer support, marketing, and sales and those building vertical-specific AI applications, Anandan said.
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