Sadly in India talking about the problems facing the country has become a taboo, and can easily get one labeled as anti national. See "Kompact AI" and its online discourse. While China practiced "Hide your strength, bide your time". India seems to practice the opposite.

Deepseek has shown that you can still do a whole lot if you have to work with limited resources as long as you have some really talented people and don't give a crap about IP. With 1.5 billion people, statistics tell us you'll find quite a few in the high tail-end of the intelligence distribution and I also don't think they have a strong sense to comply with western intellectual ownership. The biggest difficulty for India seems to be that all highly talented people will immediately use their skills to find work somewhere else. And I can't blame them, because I would do so too.

Will 1.5B people have a lot of very intelligent people too? Yes, some of the most intelligent! Will those intelligent people have the educational opportunities and research opportunities to be able to use that intelligence to deliver a SOTA model any time soon? Especially with so many resource limitations they face, I doubt it.

Education is no longer locked behind academia. Even elite universities were never really about teaching in the first place and more about connecting rich people. Today everyone with internet access can easily get all the education they need to work in this field.

During the recent AI summit in India, there has been a commitment of $200+ billion to build out the AI infrastructure and related industries.

India bids to attract over $200B in AI infrastructure investment by 2028 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/india-bids-to-attract-over...

Tech majors commit billions of dollars to India at AI summit - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/tech-majors-commit-billi...

India is catching up fast.