Sniggering at India’s AI efforts may be mistimed

On Thursday, when technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said six homegrown Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are in the works and will go live by the end of this year, there were a few sniggers all around. What everyone knows is that the Americans started the AI race with expensive models most people know of as ChatGPT and Gemini. And now the China-built DeepSeek has overturned all assumptions that has the world stunned. So, how is India to get a foot in the door? To start at the beginning will help us understand this better. Yishan Wong, CEO of Terraformation and former CEO of Reddit, does the best job of sifting through it all.