The AI Race is About Scale. India is Asking if it Should Be

The world is in a headlong rush towards AI, and the spotlight remains fixed on tech giants in the US and China. Conversations there often circle around scaling models, expanding compute power and securing vast amounts of data.  Yet, in India, a quieter current is beginning to flow. Here, researchers and startups are approaching the challenge differently—focusing less on scale and more on efficiency, inclusivity and domain-specific needs.  For Shunya Labs, the central question isn’t “how big can the model be trained?” but “how well can it reason?” Sourav Banerjee, co-founder and technical architect, is blunt about the shortcomings of today’s large language models. "They mimic the act of reasoning, but they don’t actually reason,” he said in a conversation w