India, Jan. 31 -- The launch of its latest reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, by Chinese AI company DeepSeek, earlier this month, upended the AI ecosystem globally. It also put a question mark on OpenAI's arguable leadership in the space.

Without relying heavily on high-end graphics processing units (GPUs), DeepSeek managed to surpass existing closed source models on all key benchmarks. While the Chinese company managed to achieve this feat in just $6 Mn, OpenAI spent $100 Mn over the years to build its AI model GPT-4.

Back home in India, the emergence of DeepSeek raised curiosity, ignited hopes that India can also build such models, and led to a debate on the need to have domestic foundation models. Amid all these, Uni...