India, Sept. 4 -- Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at IIT Madras, has been featured in TIME magazine's prestigious 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI).

He shares the spotlight with global leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Unlike many others on the list who lead AI companies, Khapra's work is primarily academic.

He co-founded AI4Bharat, an initiative that develops open-source tools and datasets to make AI accessible in Indian languages.

While Western models may perform well on highly represented languages like Hindi and Bengali, they are weaker on underrepresented languages.

"Fifteen years ago, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would mostly focus on Englis...