India, March 23 -- Policymakers and tech leaders in India have claimed that India should continue to focus on building the application layer of the AI stack as opposed to spending resources and capital on building the foundational models that drive these AI applications.

This view has gained further momentum after the Chinese company Deepseek changed AI economics by open-sourcing foundational AI capabilities, thereby commoditising this layer of the AI stack.

India's aspiration to become the "AI use-case capital of the world" by focusing on application-layer innovations is a commendable vision, but it risks the country's long-term strategic, cultural, and technological interests.

While leveraging AI to address India-specific challenges ...