Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal’s comments on how Indian startups must innovate like their Chinese counterparts had drawn some criticism from the startup ecosystem, but someone who’s outside the Indian startup ecosystem feels they should be taken in the right spirit.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, a search engine chatbot that could be soon valued at $18 billion, has shared his perspective on Goyal’s statement and India’s potential in AI research. Srinivas, who studied at IIT Madras and then pursued his PhD at UC Berkeley, before founding Perplexity AI in the US, believes India has the potential to build world-beating products. He found Goyal’s remarks to be “positively provocative,” designed to ignite a drive to prove the minister wrong.
Srinivas was asked what he thought India should do to improve its AI research, given the recent comments made by Piyush Goyal. He elaborated on Goyal’s comparison between India and China and asked if India could ever create companies like Perplexity, and what it would take. Srinivas responded, “I certainly think we can. And just to comment on the quote, I think it’s a very positively provocative comment. And generally, those comments are meant to instigate, you know — okay, let me come and show that I can do it sort of a reaction. So I hope that’s what it leads to.”
Srinivas said that China too had copied ideas from the west for many years. “Just to make it clear, China went through this trajectory too. Whatever India is doing right now, trying to build clones of apps that already exist, but for the Indian market, China did that for a long time. In fact, there’s a whole joke in the TV show Silicon Valley about it, how every single startup, you just prefix ‘new’ to it and then you do it in China. I think that essentially what happened for a while there, and they built all the muscle to ship products pretty quickly and iterate and only then they started building new products that did not exist and captured a global audience beyond the Chinese market, like TikTok, for example.”
Srinivas’s interpretation of Goyal’s statement as “positively provocative” suggests a belief that such remarks can be a catalyst for positive change. By building on existing models and adapting them to the Indian market, Indian startups are gaining valuable experience and developing the necessary skills to eventually create truly innovative products. This perspective counters the criticisms levelled against Indian startups, suggesting that the current focus on adapting existing models is a crucial stepping stone towards future innovation. Srinivas’s own journey, building a successful AI company outside India, further underscores his belief in the potential of Indian talent and the possibility of creating world-class products from within the country. His optimism suggests a need for patience and a focus on building foundational capabilities before expecting groundbreaking innovations.