India’s pragmatic path to large language models (LLMs)

By Kamal Das, Dean, Wadhwani Center for Government Digital Transformation

As nations strive to build Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), India finds itself at a critical juncture. There is a growing desire to create homegrown foundational LLMs. We believe these ambitions must be tempered with realism and strategic thinking. In a landscape dominated by billion-dollar investments for billion-parameter models, India must carefully assess where it can lead, where it should collaborate, and where it should simply enable.

The current global flux in foundational model development, rapid innovation cycles, and enormous capital requirements suggests that building such models from scratch should not be the Indian government’s focus, at least not using public funds. Instead, the emphasis must shift towards leveraging open-source LLMs, enabling local language access, and supporting private innovation.

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