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According to the Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0 by Marco Polo, over the past few years, China and India have significantly expanded their domestic AI talent pool to support the burgeoning AI industry. The percentage of the world’s top AI researchers hailing from China has surged from 29% in 2019 to 47% in 2022.
Historically a major exporter of top-tier AI researchers, India is now seeing an increase in talent retention. In 2019, the majority of Indian AI researchers with undergraduate degrees sought opportunities abroad. However, by 2022, one-fifth of these researchers chose to work in India.
Though there’s an increase in AI research within India, it seems that most of it has been done by researchers for their PhD thesis. None of it actually comes off for production. Similar thoughts were shared by several researchers when they spoke with AIM.
There have been research work focusing on LLMs, voice models, and using AI in several fields coming out of Indian universities, but most of them get stuck at the research phase. However, this is slowly changing with several researchers sending their papers to ICML and NeurIPS.
Putting into Work
“None of the research from the universities actually comes out. They just do research in the field like a final year project, and it dies there,” said Mufeed VH, the creator of Devika, who recently got into Y Combinator.
Researchers should come out of the universities and put their creations into products, or probably build a research lab, such as AI4Bharat.
Similarly, Adithya S Kolavi, the founder of CognitiveLab pointed out that there are also not enough grants in India coming from universities or companies for flourishing research. “You have the VC kind of things, but grants are essential to push research forward. I have not seen that concept flourish in India,” added Kolavi.
Market trends suggest that to get into the AI field and then land a research job, PhD is a must in India. “The research scene in India is good, but if you want to get into a good research institute, you require a PhD, especially if you’re a college student like me,” said Kolavi.
Mufeed agreed with Kolavi’s point and said that even though a lot of research on GitHub and X has been done by anonymous people, but since they do not have a PhD, they do not get enough recognition. They are just pursuing it like a hobby to build amazing products.
“I think in India, kids who are tinkering with this stuff should get the resources to learn more about AI,” he added. “Pretty soon, kids and students would do the same thing as researchers.”
When speaking with AIM, Amit Sheth, the chair and founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Southern Carolina (AIISC), highlighted that universities like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, help researchers by giving grants to them to move their research to production.
“Though Indian universities produce some very good engineers, they are very successful in the West. I think it’s time we take a good look at India and see if we can build something like a ChatGPT here,” Sheth said, emphasising the need for India to innovate and ship AI products to the rest of the world, including the West.
Pratik Desai, the founder of KissanAI, shared similar thoughts: “India has never led any fundamental research, but we have a golden opportunity as AI can be a levelling field.” “However, this requires a fundamental shift from coaching, and academia to a change in mindset from parents, and founders to investors,” he added.
Shift of Focus
During AIM podcastthe discussion with the young researchers of India, it was pointed out that even though universities have clubs or centres of excellence, there is not much that is achieved there apart from researching on a few GPUs and competing in olympiads. “They are good achievements but credentialism is not the point, we need actual results,” said one of the researchers.
One of the reasons that the research in AI does not get into production is the slow rate of adoption within the country. “There is a big gap that can be bridged with more industry and academia collaborations,” said Adarsh Shirawalmath, the founder of Tensoic.
“College in general has been helpful, but we are lagging a bit in terms of where the SOTA is and what we are doing because some of the professors still might be researching in CNN whereas the SOTA is really ahead,” added Shirawalmath.
When one looks at the curriculum, premier institutions in India, such as the IITs, have been heavily focused on the theoretical aspects of AI. Many of the prominent contributions in the field have also been made by professors from these institutes that have been the bedrock of innovation for several decades.
Vinija Jain, a seasoned ML researcher, who is currently working on building vision language models with cultural awareness, said that Indian researchers need to push forward even more to draw more inspiration for others. “The research from India is not only serving as great research in itself, but also as an inspiration,” said Jain.
“When you see someone else building something for the community, it motivates you to help and contributes as a building block for further developments,” she added, talking about the growing push for AI research in India, while companies such as OpenAI and Google expand their base into the Indic AI space.
