![\"India](\"\/\/image.hurimg.com\/i\/hurriyet\/75\/0x0\/6997fcb27455d5f5e5914553.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
A visitor walks past a display at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 17, 2026. (Photo by Arun SANKAR \/ AFP)<\/p>\n
Fledgling Indian artificial intelligence companies showcased homegrown technologies this week at a major summit<\/a> in New Delhi, underpinning big dreams of becoming a global AI<\/a> power.<\/p>\n But analysts said the country was unlikely to have a “DeepSeek moment” \u2014 the sort of boom China had last year with a high-performance, low-cost chatbot \u2014 any time soon.<\/p>\n Still, building custom AI tools could bring benefits to the world’s most populous nation.<\/p>\n At the AI Impact Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded three new models released by Indian companies, along with other examples of the country’s rising profile in the field.<\/p>\n “All the solutions that have been presented here demonstrate the power of ‘Made in India<\/a>‘ and India’s innovative qualities,” Modi said on Feb. 19.<\/p>\n One of the startups making a buzz at the five-day summit attended by world leaders and top technology CEOs was Sarvam AI, which this week released two large language models it says were trained from scratch in India.<\/p>\n Its models are optimised to work across 22 Indian languages, says the company, which received government-subsidised access to advanced computer processors.<\/p>\n The five-day summit, which wraped up on Feb. 20, was the fourth annual international meeting to discuss the risks and rewards of the fast-growing AI sector.<\/p>\n It is the largest yet and the first in a developing country, with Indian businesses striking deals with U.S. tech giants to build large-scale data centre infrastructure to help train and run AI systems.<\/p>\n Another Indian company that drew attention with product debuts this week include the Bengaluru-based Gnani.ai, which introduced its Vachana speech models at the summit.<\/p>\n Trained on more than a million hours of audio, Vachana models generate natural-sounding voices in Indian languages that can process customer interactions and allow people to interact with digital services out loud.<\/p>\n The government-supported BharatGen initiative, led by a group based at a university in Mumbai, also released a new multilingual AI model this week.<\/p>\n So-called sovereign AI has become a priority for many countries hoping to reduce dependence on U.S. and Chinese platforms while ensuring that systems respect local regulations including on data privacy.<\/p>\n AI models that succeed in India “can be deployed all over the world”, Modi said on Feb. 19.<\/p>\n But experts said the sheer computational might of the United States would be hard to match.<\/p>\n “Despite the headline pledges, we don’t expect India to emerge as a frontier AI innovation hub in the near term,” said Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia research at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.<\/p>\n “Its more realistic trajectory is to become the world’s largest AI adoption market, embedding AI at scale through digital public infrastructure and cost-efficient applications,” she said.<\/p>\n Nanubala Gnana Sai, a MARS fellow at the Cambridge AI Safety Institute, said that homegrown models could bring other benefits.<\/p>\n Existing models, even those developed in China, “have intrinsic bias towards Western values, culture and ethos, as a product of being trained heavily on that consensus,” Sai said.<\/p>\n India already has some major strengths including “technology diffusion, eager talent pool and cheap labour”, and dedicated efforts can help startups pivot to artificial intelligence, he said.<\/p>\n “The end-product may not ‘rival’ ChatGPT or DeepSeek on benchmarks, but will provide leverage for the Global South to have its own stand in an increasingly polarised world.”<\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" … by world leaders and top technology<\/span> CEOs was Sarvam AI, which … striking deals with U.S. tech<\/span> giants to build large-scale … some major strengths including "technology<\/span> diffusion, eager talent pool and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}