Perplexity Offers IIT Madras Students Free Subscriptions
According to Aravind Srinivas, creator and CEO of Perplexity AI, the AI search engine offers its premium subscription plan to staff and students at his alma mater, IIT Madras, for free. All IIT Madras instructors, staff, and students, where the CEO completed his undergraduate studies, have received complimentary Perplexity Pro from the company. In an X post, Srinivas stated that he was "extremely excited to start there as the brand begins its expansion for Indian campuses." This is consistent with remarks made by Srinivas in December 2024, in which he stated that he was amenable to "figuring out" an economic arrangement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in order to provide Perplexity Pro to Indian academics, faculty, and students.
He also met with Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi last month to talk about the prospects for AI adoption in India and globally. Srinivas stated that he is prepared to devote $1 million personally and five hours per week to a "group of people" who will make India "great in the context of AI" in a different post on X on January 22. Srinivas added that he is prepared to personally invest $1 million (sic) and five hours per week in the most capable team that can achieve this at this moment to restore India's greatness in the context of artificial intelligence. Think of this as a promise that is irrevocable. The team must open source the models under an MIT license and be as fixated on it as the DeepSeek team.
Investing 10 Million More in Indian Startups
The cofounder of Perplexity added that he would put an additional $10 million into the Indian business if it could "rigorously" outperform DeepSeek R1 on all metrics. Large language models (LLMs) have been created by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which is regarded as a serious rival to OpenAI. To compete with platforms like OpenAI-o1, DeepSeek introduced its newest reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, earlier this week with less than $4 million in funding.
Motivating the AI Sector of India
Pratyush Kumar, a cofounder of SarvamAI, an LLM maker with an Indic focus, responded to the Perplexity cofounder's post by pitching his own firm. Aravind is creating sovereign models at @SarvamAI, a brand that combines deep reasoning with proficiency in the Indic language. I hope you will join this expedition! Kumar said. This occurs one day after Srinivas caused a stir in the Indian AI community by stating that Indian businesses had to concentrate on building their models from the ground up rather than optimising pre-existing basic models. Srinivas urged Indian businesspeople to demonstrate to the world that they can develop AI with ISRO-like capabilities, despite pointing out that training thinking models is expensive. He was alluding to the Indian space agency's economical strategy.
Nitin Konde
