On Jan 30, India's IT minister lauded the Chinese startup DeepSeek for revolutionizing the field with its cost-effective AI assistant, drawing parallels to his government's initiatives to establish a domestic AI framework.
In March, India announced a $1.25 billion investment in AI under the IndiaAI mission, earmarked for supporting AI startups and bolstering indigenous AI infrastructure.
Addressing an event in Odisha, Ashwini Vaishnaw highlighted DeepSeek's achievements by stating, You have seen what DeepSeek has done? $5.5 million and a very, very powerful model. Because, the use of brain.
DeepSeek's swift development of an AI model using Nvidia's H800 chips for under $6 million has challenged traditional beliefs about AI expenditure and performance, surpassing OpenAI's ChatGPT downloads on Apple's App Store.
Vaishnaw's remarks appeared to be a response to comments made by OpenAI's Sam Altman during his previous visit to India, where he expressed skepticism about creating significant models within the OpenAI space with a $10 million budget.
Altman, who is set to revisit India, is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with Indian digital news and book publishers over copyright infringements.