Srinivas also said that he was ready to invest 1 Mn personally and 5 hours every week towards a “group of people” that would make India “great in the context of AI”

The Perplexity cofounder also said that he will invest $10 Mn more in the Indian company than can beat DeepSeek R1 on all benchmarks with “rigour

This comes a day after Srinivas stirred up a storm in the India AI ecosystem after he said that Indian companies focus on training their models from scratch, rather than finetuning LLMs

Perplexity AI cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that the AI search engine has provided its premium subscription plan for free to students and faculty members of his alma mater IIT Madras.

“We’ve given free Perplexity Pro to all students and faculty and staff of IIT Madras, where I did my undergrad. Super excited to start there as we begin our expansion for Indian campuses,” said Srinivas in a post on X.

This aligns with Srinivas’ comments in December 2024, when he said he was open to “figuring out” an economic structure with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to offer Perplexity Pro to Indian students, faculty and researchers.

Last month, he also met PM Modi in New Delhi and discussed the potential for AI adoption in India and across the world.

In a separate post on X on Wednesday (January 22), Srinivas said that he is ready to invest $1 Mn personally and 5 hours every week towards a “group of people” that would make India “great in the context of AI”.

“I am ready to invest a $1mm (sic) personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI. Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and obsessed like (the) DeepSeek team and has to open source the models with MIT license,” said Srinivas.

The Perplexity cofounder also said that he will invest $10 Mn more in the Indian company than can beat DeepSeek R1 on all benchmarks with “rigour”.

DeepSeek is a China-based AI company that has developed large language models (LLMs), and is being touted as a major competitor to giant OpenAI. With less than $4 Mn in funding, DeepSeek launched its latest reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, earlier this week to take on platforms like OpenAI-o1.

Reacting to the Perplexity cofounder’s post, Indic-focussed LLM maker SarvamAI cofounder Pratyush Kumar pitched his own startup. “Aravind, at @SarvamAI, we are building sovereign models that combine deep reasoning and Indic language skills. Would love to have you join this mission!” Kumar said.

This comes a day after Srinivas stirred up a storm in the Indian AI ecosystem after he said that Indian companies should focus on training their models from scratch, rather than finetuning existing foundational models.

While noting that “thinking models” are costly to train, Srinivas called on the Indian entrepreneurs to “show the world that it’s capable of ISRO-like feet (sic) for AI”. He was referring to the cost-effective and frugal approach of the Indian space agency.