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

GCCs keep India’s tech job market alive, even as IT services industry embarks on a hiring moratorium
Global Capability Centres, offshore subsidiaries set up by multinational corporations, mostly known by an acronym GCCs, are now the primary engine sustaining India’s tech job market, contrasting sharply with the hiring slowdown witnessed by large firms in the country.

Mobile phones are increasingly migrating to smaller chips that are more energy efficient and powerful supported by specialised Neural Processing Units (NPUs) to accelerate AI workloads directly on devices, said Anku Jain, India Managing Director for MediaTek, a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor firm that claims a 47% market share India’s smartphone chipset market.

In one more instance of a wholly owned subsidiary of a Chinese multinational company in India getting ‘Indianised’, Bharti Enterprises, a diversified business conglomerate with interests in telecom, real estate, financial services and food processing among others, and the local arm of private equity major Warburg Pincus have announced to collectively own a 49% stake in Haier India, a subsidiary of the Haier Group which is headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong, China.










