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Opinion News

The Economic Times

Opinion / The Economic Times

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Why small, application-specific models are India's path forward in AI

The logic is straightforward. Frontier model development is capital-intensive, compute-hungry, and concentrated among a handful of firms with resources India doesn't have. Chasing this is expensive and probably futile. But application-specific models that solve defined problems in Indian contexts - healthcare screening, agricultural advisory, educational assessment, government service delivery - could be developed with fewer resources, run on existing infrastructure, and create genuine economic value.

18 Feb 2026 12:47 am