New Delhi, Feb. 11 -- China's technological breakthroughs tend to create headlines, and as they burst onto the scene, a befuddled world is usually asking how it was done. But nothing has been as spectacular as the emergence of the DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) model that was developed by a young hedge fund manager on a slender budget in Hangzhou and is just two years old. We are familiar with the wide swathe of destruction it unleashed in the US, shaving off nearly US $1 trillion from the market value of the big guns like AI Open, Nvidia and a host of other players. The shock and awe worldwide were unparalleled, prompting the head of a stellar Big Tech company to hail the debut of the Chinese start-up's R1 model-R stands for reasoning-as "impressive". Another termed it "the most amazing and impressive breakthrough" he had ever seen.
But what of India? I was keen to know what the country made of DeepSeek, particularly because it was a puny David who had taken on the titans of the tech industry like Open AI. As a rule, the Indian government tends to ignore any news demonstrating China's technological prowess but makes what are patently delusional claims about its progress. If pressed for answers, ministers usually claim that India would soon be a leader in some technology or the other with vague claims that are seldom questioned by the media. In 2022, for instance, the then Union telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw claimed at a very late launch of 5G in the country that Indian developers had many of the technologies required for the development of 6G and that the country would soon be a leader in the next generation network since they held many patents in this field. This was stated when India was still playing catch-up on 5G with the rest of the world.
About China, the Modi government has shown little inclination to cooperate or learn from its giant neighbour. Instead, there has been a marked hostility in the wake of the border standoff with China in 2017. Over the years, it has banned over 300 applications and services linked to China, citing security concerns. The most popular of these was TikTok, which had around 200 million users in India when it was banned. DeepSeek's stunning success, engineered at such a low cost, appears to have brought about a remarkable change in the official perception in Delhi. Vaishnaw, now the Union minister for information technology (IT), not only praised DeepSeek for its "powerful model" but also said that India will host the Chinese AI laboratory's large language models on domestic servers. This is an extraordinary turnabout given that security concerns will remain a troubling issue since DeepSeek's policy statement is clear that the information it collects from users will be stored in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China. Why, then, is India willing to overlook such concerns this time?
The big attraction could be that DeepSeek is open source, which means that its base code is publicly available for any developer to use and modify at will. India has its own AI ambitions of building a "foundational model", and it might be hoping to leapfrog into the big league by learning from DeepSeek's very affordable common computing facility. Vaishnaw says India is all set to launch its own safe and secure indigenous AI model at an affordable cost that will be less than half the rate charged by the global giants, but how soon? Last March, the Modi government announced an outlay of just around Rs 10,300 crore for its IndiaAI Mission, which will be used to fund AI startups and to develop its own AI infrastructure. This is a pittance compared to what the Silicon Valley giants funnel into their companies, but using DeepSeek might speed up the process.
India's announcement has triggered more alarms in the US. Sam Altman, chief executive officer (CEO) of AI Open, has hot-footed it to Delhi within a week of this announcement, hoping to embed his company's products in the IndiaAI Mission and other initiatives. And it is a radically changed Altman who is making his sales pitch now. During a 2023 visit to India, Altman had poured cold water on the country's plan to develop its own training foundation models, dismissing it as "totally hopeless to compete with us". This time around, he is urging India to go for the full stack approach in AI in talks with Vaishnaw.
What could have spurred this change of heart? One can safely assume that DeepSeek founder Liang Wengfung's out-of-the-box thinking has shaken up his foundational beliefs. Liang has demonstrated that more is possible with less-both finances and hardware-if you have a clear idea about what you want to achieve. He used 2,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of 100,000 GPUs, avoided computational overkill by cutting down from 32 decimal places to eight and thus increasing memory, and used gaming GPUs instead of specialised hardware.
This is a disruptive technology of a different order, and underlying it is a radically different approach to building a business: open source. This must be unsettling for Altman, who follows the patented, closed-source model despite his promise of keeping ChatGPT open. So, when he says it is "invigorating to have a new competitor", it does not seem that he is all that comfortable with the disruption.
India might benefit from using DeepSeek and building on its platform, but it needs to keep in mind Liang's basic philosophy. Innovation, he emphasises, is not solely driven by business; it also needs curiosity and a desire to create. He also warns that there is a big gap between imitation and originality. This is not a trait that the government has encouraged in the past decade. It has meddled with institutions of higher education to reshape them in the saffron idea of a glorious India rooted in the past by foisting what is called Indian Knowledge Systems. Even the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are not exempt and are teaching subjects such as reincarnation and out-of-body experiences. With such arcane concerns, how can IITs be expected to produce Liang and others of his ilk, who are propelling China to technological supremacy? DTE
Views expressed are personal
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.