Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas ready to invest $1 million and his time for “making India great again” in AI

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said he was ready to invest $1 million and offer five hours of his time every week to help a team training foundational models and making them open source, for India to become “great again” in AI.

“I am ready to invest a $1mm personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI. Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and obsessed like DeepSeek team and has to open source the models with MIT license,” said Srinivas in a post on X on January 22.

He said he would invest $10 million more if DeepSeek’s R1 could be beaten strongly across all benchmarks.

Srinivas previously hailed the ability to achieve technological milestones such as training AI models without spending too much money. He noted this was a quality that Elon Musk admired.

“I think that’s possible for AI, given the recent achievements of DeepSeek. So, I hope India changes its stance from wanting to reuse models from open-source and instead trying to build muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks,” said the Perplexity CEO in an X post on January 21.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup whose newly released R1 model under the open MIT license surpassed OpenAI’s o1 across multiple benchmarks, per the company. The company’s recent launch has spurred AI technologists to ask if sophisticated models can be created at far lower costs.

“India must show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like [feat] for AI,” Srinivas said.