IIT Alumni Meets Technology hobbyists at a meal. AI can’t match them
Around the world there are around 300 iit alumni meets annually. That is almost like one daily. There are 23 iits, each has an average of two bodies and each body has an average of ten chapters. And every chapter has at least one get together a year. Some have one a month. But if we split it by attendance, we have 300+ physical meets with 100+ attendance and 3000+ meets a year with 10+ attendance. That is a lot of interaction in a year.
Yesterday I attended my 100th meet in this calendar year. This was a big year. It was the 75th anniversary of the iit ecosystem and also the 5th anniversary of the iit alumni council which is not an umbrella body but a collective of philanthropists from across all alumni bodies and chapters. The list of philanthropists – those designated as patrons or fellows in the iit alumni council almanacs is growing very quickly. It is now 12% of the total council membership which itself is now 8% of all alumni who graduated between 1980 and 2000. With 3.000 dollar billionaires, this is a more powerful group than almost any in the world. If it were a country, it would rank higher than India on almost all parameters.
As is the tradition for alumni meets – there are a bunch of star speakers and lots of standalone tables for grouping. We have the ceremonial conversations with the academicians, a sprinkling of young alumni and a majority of well placed CXOs and entrepreneurs looking for just upgrading their knowledge levels. And meets rarely disappoint in the latter.
Yesterday was no exception. In keeping with the fashion of the day – a lot was about ai. Sharad Sanghi – the data centre pioneer – spoke about his work at building India’s only neocloud. And Prof Ganesh Ramkrishnan spoke of Bharat Gen and his journey to build India’s first trillion dollar foundational ai model. Sharad is doing his play with a couple of thousand crores of private equity and Bharat Gen has 1000+ crores of grants from Meity and DST. The govt has few better options as does India.
It was an intense session. As a country our numbers don’t match up. The ecosystem yesterday was about a billion dollars investable. And that includes the outlay at iit bombay which is adding square feet and hostel rooms at an impressive rate. Around 5 million square feet and 10,000 hostel rooms have been added since 2005. IITB now confers more PhD degrees per year (500+) than BTechs it did in my time (300+). That is a massive increase.
But we are two zeroes away from the budget of say a Stanford University. On the AI research piece, we are three zeroes away. Even on PhDs, we are one zero away from the Chinese at an overall level. India has 6500 students pursuing a PhD in ai and related areas. China has over 250,000. The zero game is a hard one.
And the govt is not going to solve it. Prof Ganesh and his team doing Bharat Gen are geniuses. But 1000 cr is not going to take them across the finish line.