Frugal engineering can make AI cost-effective for India: Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani discusses frugal engineering in India to make AI cost-effective, positioning the country as AI use-case capital.

Frugal engineering can make AI cost-effective in India and the country will emerge as the AI use-case capital of the world, said Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Infosys.

‘’Instead of running AI on large frontier models, the country should use much smaller, targeted, more secure, cost-effective AI models,” Mr. Nilekani said at the launch of a full-stack Generative AI platform by Sarvam AI, a homegrown GenAI startup which built a small language model (SLM) with two billion parameters.

For India it was about applying AI technologies in everyday use cases and the country was now putting together infrastructure and tools using AI, he said.

Designed to be voice-enabled and multilingual, this full-stack Gen AI platform can support 10 Indian languages, and is aimed to revolutionise AI accessibility and adoption across the country’s diverse linguistic and socio-economic landscape, claimed Sarvam AI.

‘’I am very bullish on what Sarvam has built. And they have shown that India can build models that are scalable and effective,” Nilekani added.

‘’This marks a pivotal step in the development of sovereign AI solutions tailored specifically for India,’‘ said co-founders of the company Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan.