Need bottom-up, sectoral AI deployment rather than scale: Economic Survey

Given the constraints of capital, computing capacity, energy and infrastructure, pursuing “scale in artificial intelligence for its own sake” is neither efficient nor necessary, and India should aim for a bottom-up, multiple sector-specific approach to ensure it pays dividends, the Economic Survey 2025-26 has said.

The survey flagged high concentration of frontier large language model development in the hands of a few major firms, and export controls imposed on the most-advanced processors required for scaling up frontier model development, as major entry barriers. The most widely deployed AI models are also proprietary and opaque, limiting transparency around their training data, internal logic and update mechanisms, it said.