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Venkatarangan Thirumalai's avatar

Indeed, this is a concerning and very real problem. The challenge India faces in AI talent development is not one that can be easily overcome, especially considering the country's historical success in IT outsourcing. Over the past three decades, India has established itself as the global gold standard for creating talent, workers, and managers suited for traditional IT roles. However, the AI landscape presents a new and different challenge.

In his book "The Coming Wave," Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, highlights China's significant lead in AI. This advantage, as he points out, is no accident. It's the result of more than a decade of focused effort and billions of dollars in investment. Unfortunately, India's current level of investment and strategic focus in AI appears to be far behind.

That said, while catching up will be extremely challenging, it's not impossible for India. The path forward requires visionaries across multiple sectors: industry, government, academia, and particularly industry bodies. The primary hurdle will be the enormous investment required, which may not yield immediate returns. This is where government support and public funding become crucial.

The solution will likely involve a multi-pronged approach:

Revamping educational curricula to emphasize AI and related technologies

Fostering closer collaboration between academia and industry

Encouraging more research and development in AI within India

Creating incentives for companies to invest in AI talent development

Establishing national AI initiatives and policies to guide and support these efforts

As someone with extensive experience in the IT services space, I can attest to India's ability to rise to technological challenges. However, this particular challenge will require a level of coordinated effort and investment that surpasses previous initiatives. It's a critical juncture for India's tech industry, and the actions we take now will significantly impact our global competitiveness in the AI era.

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Ashish Sinha's avatar

Great points Venkatarangan.

Yeah - we are a decade behind in R&D - and we only realize it in closed door conversations. Publicly, we are claiming to be something else. This reminds of a recent quote by Sergey Brin: "You need to be willing to have some embarrassments and take some risks." (https://www.nextbigwhat.com/p/writing-code-from-scratch-feels-really)

As a society, we can only build an engineering culture when we are open for embarrassments / failure/trials - i.e. hacking around/building products.

And that's a long way to go. We don't even need to invest building foundational models - but atleast at application layer, can do better? Yes, we can and we should strive for that (to start with).

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