IIT Madras Prof Balaraman Ravindran Questions IndiaAI Mission’s Timeline to Build an Indigenous LLM

IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran has cast doubt on the government’s ambitious plan to develop an indigenous large language model (LLM) under the IndiaAI mission within six months.  In an exclusive conversation with AIM, Ravindran indicated that the timeline may be too short to build a top-notch model and doubted whether the initiative can truly position India on the global AI stage. “I think six months is too aggressive a timeline for us to really build super capable models. What we are probably going to get are right or decent models; we are not going to shake the world,” he said. This comes in the backdrop of Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw expecting India’s LLM to be ready within the next ten months. The government allocated ₹2,000 crore in the Union Budget 2