India, Aug. 15 -- India's AI story has grown beyond building an Indian equivalent of ChatGPT. The current phase is about building the infrastructure, data and applications that can make AI work for India and give Indian companies an edge in markets beyond the country.

The government is already doing its bit. The IndiaAI Mission, with an outlay of roughly Rs.10,300 Cr, is backing around 20 indigenous sovereign AI model proposals, spanning 12 large and eight small language models. It is also building a public dataset platform and offering subsidised access to GPUs for startups, tackling two of the biggest constraints facing India's AI ambitions: data and compute.

But the more interesting signs are emerging outside the government programme...