India’s AI LLM path may lie in adaption, not building from scratch, suggests MeitY secretary S Krishnan

Secretary for Ministry for Electronics and Information Technology S Krishnan

Building a large language model (LLM) from scratch may not be worth the effort, suggested S Krishnan, secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on November 6. Instead, Krishnan advocated for adapting existing LLMs to cater to specific sectors.

Krishnan’s statement comes amid a broader conversation on India’s AI strategy, particularly as it balances innovation with resource optimisation. As global players like OpenAI, Google, and Meta dominate foundational LLM development, India is looking to tailor these technologies to its economic and social landscape.

"It may not be worth the effort to build an LLM on our own, will be instead better to adapt it to different sectors," Krishnan said at a Microsoft event, while in conversation with Microsoft AI's CEO Mustafa Suleyman in Bengaluru.

Krishnan's statement also echoes Infosys chairman and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani’s recent remarks at Meta's Build with AI summit, where the latter emphasised leveraging existing LLMs to create smaller, sector-focused models trained on locally relevant data.

"Let other people build LLMs, we will make sure it works for people" he had said.

The government in March, approved the Rs 10,732 crore IndiaAI Mission with the aim of creating computing infrastructure for the country, AI centres for multi-modal LLMs, procuring 10,000 graphics processing units, and more.

During his conversation with Suleyman, Krishnan spoke on the IndiaAI Mission, explaining that the Indian government has put in $ 1.3 bn in to the initiative, $500 mn for access to AI compute and so on.

Krishnan also informed that under the IndiaAI mission the government is going to establish an AI safety institute.

A major part of the initiative is also the establishment of the non personal data platform. On that Krishnan said that the will make data available on an anonymised basis.

The secretary also touched on the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which he said addresses issues surrounding personal data. He also said that existing legislations have been addressing issues surrounding deepfakes.