Unsolicited advice to the Indian govt on frontier models

What can do to get ahead Here’s some unsolicited advice to the government on what to do to help boost India’s sovereign model story. 1. Mandate domestic models for all non-critical functions Government needs to be a guaranteed buyer for homegrown models. There are tons of applications that don’t require SOTA performance. (To be clear, for mission-critical use-cases, using anything other than SOTA would be a shortsighted decision). China got ahead because of their domestic demand (Anthropic and OpenAI models don’t work there). 2. Release massive distillations of chain-of-thought of SOTA Chinese models on diverse prompts (and post-process to remove China bias) Inference is easy and cheap. So the government should simply create a national public repository of SOTA reasoning chains in order to prevent each model creator doing it separately. Centralize and absorb the cost. Thinking Machines (US company) did finetuning on Kimi 2.5 to bootstrap reasoning. Indian model companies would do the…