Paras Chopra, who recently sold his bootstrapped software startup Wingify for $200 million, is off to start his next venture in artificial intelligence (AI). In a social media post announcing his new idea, Chopra said he would be setting up a foundation AI lab in India that produces state-of-the-art models and algorithms for the world. The announcement comes amid the government of India pressing on the accelerator for the development of AI models in India amid DeepSeek’s disruption in the global tech sector.
A foundational AI model is essentially a large-scale AI model that serves as a base for a variety of downstream tasks and is pre-trained on massive datasets. Think of it as a student who has read millions of books, articles, and images, learning general knowledge about the world.
Once fed with tons of data, the model can figure out how words, images, and sounds relate to each other and can be used for different jobs including writing articles, answering questions, creating images, or even helping with search engine optimisation.
Chopra said he is currently hiring ‘technical’ people to “build highly efficient reasoning model from India.” The team hired is for putting “a proposal for India’s AI mission.”
The country’s AI Mission, launched 10 months back, focuses on developing AI applications in critical sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, weather forecasting, and disaster management. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav on Thursday said 18 applications have been identified in these domains to harness AI for societal benefits under the AI mission.
Vaishnav also launched a Call for Proposals under the India AI Mission to support the development of foundational AI models, inviting startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs to collaborate on creating state-of-the-art AI models using Indian datasets.
Focusing on developing a reasoning AI model, Chopra said, “Problem solving in hard, complex domains is the bedrock of all economic growth. And if we crack superintelligent reasoning models that think creatively, we will turbocharge the growth and have a real chance of solving many of the world’s current unsolved problems like poverty, cancer and the mysteries of universe and consciousness.”
Moreover, a focus on efficiency is important because “unlike western Al labs, we don’t have a billion dollars to spend on GPUs at the start and it’ll force us to look at problems from a fresh perspective as we believe constraints lead to reasoning creativity.”
He further said, “we’re inspired by efficiency of human brain which evolution has chiseled to be energy and data efficient, providing a proof that general intelligence may be possible to run on 20 watts of energy and a few data points to learn that the human brain requires.”