India, Dec. 14 -- The Big Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype machine is running in overdrive. The US and China keep unveiling "revolutionary" new models that supposedly think like humans. Each one is bigger, costlier, and noisier than the last, while burning enough electricity to light a city. The machines keep growing, but the progress keeps shrinking.

India has become a casualty of the hype, dazzled by OpenAI's trillion-dollar dreams. Every policy discussion now seems to revolve around building an Indian ChatGPT. The reflex is to spend, as if leadership in AI can be bought with chips and data centres. It simply can't.

The reality is that progress will come from solving real problems, not from joining the race to build the next giant mo...