'Silly old programs paraded as AI': Narayana Murthy slams AI hype in India

Infosys founder Narayana Murthy

IT services major Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy called out “silly old programs” being paraded as artificial intelligence (AI) by tech companies in India.

He was speaking at the TiE Con Mumbai 2025. “I think somehow it has become a fashion in India to talk of AI for everything. I have seen several normal ordinary programs touted as AI,” he said.

He went on to explain, “There are two fundamental principles in AI. One, machine learning, which is a large-scale correlation. Therefore, it helps you based on a large amount of data, to predict.”

“That is simple machine learning. The second is what is called deep learning. Deep learning imitates how the human brain works,” he added.

Also read: Why Narayana Murthy believes India needs ‘compassionate capitalism’ to grow

Murthy explained that deep learning will be able to solve, and handle what are called “unsupervised algorithms”. While machine learning by and large handles supervised algorithms because you have to give a lot of data into that, deep learning uses the data to create new branches of programs or new conditions. And then it will be able to take decisions.

“So unsupervised data, which uses deep learning and neural networks, has much greater potential to do things that mimic human behaviour better. But what I am seeing being called AI is silly, old programs,” Murthy said breaking the AI myth.

At Infosys, the company has been developing small language models (SLM) using open-source components and its proprietary data sets. Strong focus on Generative AI (Gen AI) has prompted the Infosys to work on its SLM, that has been designed for specific industry applications and use cases.