The fact that creating an LLM from scratch requires tons of money is well established now. It is one of the primary reasons why India only has a couple of them, which are also much smaller compared to those built in the US, China, or Europe – the AI regulation capital of the world.
Even in the whole of Europe, there is only Mistral from France which is building LLMs to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. While speaking with AIM, several industry leaders agreed that there was no point in trying to compete in building the largest LLM as it is necessary to focus on the vertical applications of AI, not the horizontal.
The reason is simple – lack of capital. “Who will give $200 million to a startup in India to build an LLM?” said Mohandas Pai, head of Aarin Capital and former CFO of Infosys, when asked about the lack of innovation from Indian IT. “Why is nothing …