Nov 9, 2024. TCS R&D Centre, Pune
India had no LLM, and no path to a LLM
We set a target 5.12.25 twelve noon !!!
I had just returned from a charged visit to the IIT Chennai research park and the honour of a private meal with Padma Sri Ashok Jhunjhunwala. I was at the 3,000 person TCS R&D centre outside Magarpatta in Pune to spend the day with Dr Harrick Vin, Global CTO of TCS. Next was a meeting with my batchmate Dr Mamen who worked with Nvidia. Then there were the other fundamen I went to college with – Vikram Adve who invented the Mobile App, Deepak Amin who led the team that built the Internet Explorer, Dr Raminder Bhajwa who designed Google data centres and Dr Rohinton Dehmubed who invented carrier Ethernet.
I was trying to approach AI from a common sense perspective typical of Cham-ikal (nickname for chemical as JEE ranks were way below Computer Science). And to figure out a path to catch up. Deep seek had yet to happen and ChatGPT had redefined speed of uptake. I didn’t know mips and GPUs but I knew entropy and enthalpy. And Carnot cycle. And Rankine cycle.
I heard the familiar pitch. You need unimaginable sums of money to catch up. We don’t even have a contender in the race. Ai is run by computer engineers.
But chips are made by chemical engineers.
Nothing was adding up. I pinged prof Jhunjhunwala for a crash course in refrigeration. He obliged. I headed back to IITB to go back to my BTP guide – Prof Vinay Juvekar, Professor Emeritus and L&T Chair professor. I went down to L&T Hazira and chased my nuclear scientist friend Umesh Dani. The number of challenges had now increased exponentially. “Difficult” had become “Impossible”.
I am familiar with this. The good thing about ignorance is that you don’t lose confidence. We set December 5th, 2025 as the date for India’s own foundational Ai and LLM. On that fateful day, the 9th of November, 2024 – I had no clue how and if this would happen.
I spoke to the distinguished fellows of Ai at the IIT Alumni Council. Prof Pushpak Bhattacharya, Prof Jyoti Joglekar, Prof Swami Suryanil. They didnt run me down. Academicians have more empathy. Esp my favourite ai expert – Prof Joglekar who has tolerated my puerile questions for five years and refused to give up on me.
And guess what.
We made it as a country.
We made it as an alumni group.
On the 5th of December we had a working 2.7 billion parameter ai model working. Bharat Gen is live, with 2000 crores committed. The IIT Alumni Council series book Ayurveda Revisited is top of global charts on Amazon. And BharatGens ayurveda platform AyurParam is ahead of Gemini 3 which has a 5.5 trillion parameter ai model built at a cost of several hundred millions of dollars.
I was honoured to be at Bharat Gen today. I didn’t make it happen. India did. The journey has not been easy. Prof Pushpak Bhattacharya passed on a month ago – sudden heart attack. His PhD student Prof Ganesh Ramkrishna is the lead for Bharat Gen. And this is just the beginning.
