AI is the next battleground, expect a lot of geopolitical posturing around access: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Former Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Artificial intelligence (AI) will be the battleground of the future for countries, leading to “geopolitical posturing” for its access, said Former Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the Mumbai Tech Week on February 28, Chandrasekhar emphasised on the need for India to develop deep capabilities in AI, as it is still lagging a bit in comparison to China and the US.

“AI is the next battleground of the future and there is going to be a lot of geopolitical posturing around access to AI and it is very, very important for countries to create deep capabilities of AI,” he said.

Chandrasekhar added, “Whether you want to call it sovereign AI, whether you want to call it your data sets, foundational models, but having your own deep AI capabilities is as important as having models that you fine tune, open source model that you build your models on or expert models for building your own LLM. But having your deep capabilities is very, very important as it is important for semiconductors, it is important for AI.”

His comments come at a time when government’s IndiaAI Mission is seeking to back development of indigenous foundational AI models, having earmarked a total grant of Rs 1,500 crore for this. It is currently accepting and evaluation proposals for the same from startups and researchers.

In January, the Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the country has at least six major developers who can develop AI models in six to eight months on the outer limit.

Is India late to the AI party?

When asked if six to eight months will be enough for the country to launch its first large language model, Chandrasekhar said, “In this game, neither the timelines nor any roadmap will hold true…What the government is doing, is really to catalyse the AI ecosystem.”

“In a sense, on AI adoption, India has accelerated. But on AI capabilities, we are a bit behind China and the US. We have to play catch up. But these are early days, this is like a race which has got 20 heats. The first heat has been run. There are 19 other heats to be run before we will decide who wins or who loses,” he explained, adding, “So, we are now showing up and we are building these deep AI capabilities even as AI adoption continues to accelerate.”

Since late 2022, several US technology giants had jumped into the AI race to quickly build generative AI models including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic to name a few. For the longest time, the US was the frontrunner in this race that required billions of dollars of investment, huge compute capabilities, resources and talent.

With Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launching its large language models earlier this year, with an investment of $5.6 million million and using only 2,000 GPUs, as compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4o that required $100 million to train the model – this notion was challenged.