Why are Indian companies not developing frontier models?

The answer is in economics, not talent. The biggest hurdle for an Indian company trying to develop frontier model is that right from the get go, it has to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI free plans + all Chinese open weight models. Chinese models mostly flourished due to the demand from their domestic market which OpenAI/Anthropic couldn’t meet as they’re unavailable in China. This unmet demand created space for innovation. China knows this story well, but here in India, we like unfettered, globalized free market, and that requires an upstart to compete with established companies from across the world. If India is serious about the AI race, it needs to create a massive guaranteed market for domestic AI or else it’ll be economically irrational for any funder to underwrite a product in a highly competitive, already established market. Join 200k followers Follow @paraschopra Get new essays on your email: The post Why are Indian companies not developing frontier models? appeared first…