Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, has lately stepped up his deal with India’s AI ambitions and has now pledged to speculate $1 million and 5 hours per week to assist the nation obtain greatness in AI.

In a publish on X (previously Twitter), Srinivas wrote, “I’m prepared to speculate a $1mm personally and 5 hours/week of my time into essentially the most certified group of individuals that may do that proper now for making India nice once more within the context of AI. Contemplate this as a dedication that can’t be backtracked. The group must be cracked and obsessed like DeepSeek group and has to open supply the fashions with MIT license.”

“And beating DeepSeek R1 on all benchmarks with rigor will imply I’ll make investments $10mm extra.” the Perplexity AI CEO added.

What’s Srinivas proposing?

Srinivas wrote a collection of posts on Tuesday, beginning with criticizing Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s stance that India ought to ignore constructing giant language fashions (LLMs) in favour of constructing compute, infrastructure and AI cloud.

The Perplexity AI CEO stated that Nilekani is “flawed on pushing Indians to disregard mannequin coaching expertise and simply deal with constructing on prime of current fashions. Important to do each.”

He later went on so as to add that India has fell in a lure pondering that AI fashions would take some huge cash to coach however the current landmarks of China’s DeepSeek AI reveal that is not the case. Srinivas additionally wished that India adjustments its stance on AI fashions and focuses on constructing “muscle to coach their fashions that aren’t simply good for Indic languages however are globally aggressive on all benchmarks”.

The Indian-born entrepreneur famous that whereas he’s not able to run a DeepSeek-like the corporate, he’s comfortable to assist anybody “obsessed sufficient to do it and open-source the fashions.”