When Archimedes stepped into the bathtub and sensed that the overflowing volume of water was equal to the weight of his body part immersed in it, he stepped out in ecstatic “Eureka”. When digital photography storm was blowing hard, Eastman Kodak did nothing about it and suffered its “Kodak” moment. Between the Eureka and Kodak moments lie the opportunity to innovate and build capacity. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education presenting such a huge opportunity?
The development and adoption of AI is becoming a superpower showdown as the global ‘AIms race’ gets brutal and scarier. The effect of AI is seeing its premature outcomes faster than ever. OpenAI and Google Deep Mind won gold in the International Maths Olympiad much ahead of the time it was predicted to. The compute power and size of the large language models (LLMs) will very soon establish global supremacy between the two warring giants—America and China. The global economic growth with AI replacing human tasks is predicted at unprecedented preposterous levels. From a stagnated global economic upto the 17th century to a 0.5 per cent to 1.9 per cent to 2.8 per cent in the 18th, 19th and 20th century respectively, the 21st century economic growth is a dizzying cocktail of numbers. At 30 per cent replacement levels of human tasks by AI, the expected GDP growth in a decade is 20 per cent. This may be unbelievably true but markets need to adapt and adopt AI in an unprecedented manner. Big markets mean bigger adoption. Welcome to the Indian market!
If the population of India is considered a social issue on one side, it is also considered an economic asset on the other from a multi-dimensional perspective. On the AI side, it is estimated that India’s share of 15 per cent of the total global ChatGPT users makes it the largest growing market. Others like DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Llama, Claude, etc. offering variety make Indian consumers a force to reckon. Numerous studies have indicated the economic effect of AI adoption—there is good and bad to the economic story. Let us focus on the good and begin with the India AI story which is primitive with promise.
The popular ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeeks of the world in India may have local competition from the Indic Sarvam AI or Bharat Gen. While Sarvam is built on top of a French technology, Bharat Gen is built over many open-source variants. Still Indian LLMs are outside the top 200 LLMs in the world as ranked by AI benchmarking website LMArena and a 2024 Stanford study puts the USD 1.2 billion private AI investment in India way below the US and China and nowhere near the global top 10. It is still a long way to go for the India AI mission but we have started well. With a need to address two major issues—quality of data and quality of talent, there is abundance in opportunities. Despite the majority of the top AI researchers leaving the country, still there is plenty of scope in the master policy ‘AI for India’. While building native LLMs is one part which requires long term vision, investment and commitment, there is another big area for India to make a difference with its demographic dividend.
The recent announcement of `500 crore in the 2025 budget for AI Center of Excellence in Education is a starter of sorts. Neither is `500 crore enough to build indigenous LLMs nor is it the last budgetary allocation. There is plenty more to come that requires prudent use of AI than to splurge on developing AI. Between use and development lies the critical balance for a country like India. We cannot afford to let go an opportunity that AI is presenting to us. While LLM development work can happen in cozy penthouses, noisy academic gullies need to train and build capacity to develop frugal and impactful AI solutions for manufacturing, biotechnology, software engineering, energy, environment, agriculture, defence, etc. An AI assisted higher education to create value in these areas translate to huge indigenous economic growth. How big will it get depends on how smart we think and act. Between the solely focusing Eureka moment and missing the big picture Kodak moment lies a pleasant smiley. In short: We need an AI smiley between Kodak and Eureka moments.
