India should take a leadership role in artificial intelligence (AI) services, similar to how the country transformed the global IT services industry, minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said on January 23.
The minister also said that the government plans to develop a foundational model, but emphasised that India's focus will remain on building solutions for various sectors.
"What will bring value is how the models are used for solving problems of enterprises, problems of governments, problems of individuals, right? That is where the real value will be," Vaishnaw said in an interview to Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"The way our country took leadership in IT, the time has come when we should be taking leadership in AI services. That is going to be a big game changer," he emphasised.
Foundational model in the pipeline
Responding to a question on whether investing in a foundational AI model would give India a geopolitical advantage, Vaishnaw confirmed plans to develop one.
"We will be doing that. So, the layers are AI chip, the model, the applications, the agents which come over it," he said.
"We are working on getting the GPU design with our IP rights owned by us, by our country in the next 3 to 5 years, our foundation model. But the major focus will be on the solution space, " he reiterated.
Vaishnaw's comments come at a time when there is debate underway on whether India should invest in developing foundational models or concentrate on developing applications on top of existing models.
Recently, at the WEF 2025, Moneycontrol caught up with AI pioneers Andrew Ng and Yoshua Bengio who had different view points on the matter. While Ng advised India to focus on AI applications, Bengio was of the view that countries that invest in foundational models have a geopolitical advantage.
The minister also said that the government plans to invest in talent by providing the latest technologies.
"200 universities will give them the latest access to the compute power, access to the world's best models so that they can come out with good focused solutions which can then be deployed in India for the world as a service and as a solution provider for the country," Vaishnaw said.
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