Perplexity CEO willing to devote his time and $1 million to “making India great again” with AI

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, stated that he was prepared to provide $1 million and five hours of his time each week to assist a team in training basic models and making them open source to help India become “great again” in the field of artificial intelligence.

“I am prepared to personally invest $1 million and five hours per week in the most qualified team that can do this at this time to restore India’s greatness in the context of artificial intelligence.” Think of this as an irrevocable promise. In a post on X on January 22, Srinivas stated, “The team must be cracked and as obsessed as the DeepSeek team and must open source the models with an MIT license.”

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He claimed that if DeepSeek’s R1 could significantly outperform across all benchmarks, he would invest an additional $10 million.

In the past, Srinivas has praised the capacity to accomplish technological milestones like training AI models without incurring significant costs. He mentioned that Elon Musk admired this trait.

“Given DeepSeek’s recent successes, I believe AI can achieve that. The CEO of Perplexity stated in an X post on January 21: “I hope India changes its stance from wanting to reuse models from open-source to instead trying to build muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks.”

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According to the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, its recently published R1 model under the open MIT license outperformed OpenAI’s o1 on some benchmarks. AI experts are now wondering if complex models may be produced at significantly cheaper costs in light of the company’s recent launch.

Srinivas stated, “India needs to demonstrate to the world that it can achieve ISRO-like [feat] for AI.”