6 ms·

I am still very surprised how absent India is from the LLM game.

walrus01 14d ago
Individual Indians are very much present in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I have a theory that the top 5% talent of Indian nationals who are legitimately qualified and skilled, for very logical reasons would much rather take a six-figure USD equivalent salary in EUR or USD and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that come with it rather than bootstrap an Indian domestic AI lab.
- torginus 14d ago
  It's not like people in other places couldn't solve this problem. Yes, the US pays more, but a lot of people would still prefer staying home, and it's not like they wouldn't be paid very well compared to the local salary. And besides, a lot of Indians in India are working for FAANG, and don't earn US money - I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company.
  - walrus01 14d ago
    > I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company. India doesn't have the same structure, existence and prevalence of VCs with large pools of available seed round and series A money that are necessary for a start-up to acquire enough funds to realistically train a model. Particularly with the hardware/datacenter costs involved in that. There's a reason why a huge number of motivated and talented Indian people form companies outside of India.
    - torginus 14d ago
      I don't really have an special insight on India, but some of the biggest tech CEOs are Indian born and raised (Google, MS...) Surely they have the resources, connections and experience in how to build tech companies. In fact I'd be surprised if they were not involved in some capacity. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but considering they have the people, money, and connections, I would expect a lot more success stories.
petcat 14d ago
India suffers from massive tech brain-drain to USA. Also the country is severely GPU compute-constained. It's really just the same story as EU.

Individual Indians are very much present in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I have a theory that the top 5% talent of Indian nationals who are legitimately qualified and skilled, for very logical reasons would much rather take a six-figure USD equivalent salary in EUR or USD and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that come with it rather than bootstrap an Indian domestic AI lab.

torginus 14d ago
It's not like people in other places couldn't solve this problem. Yes, the US pays more, but a lot of people would still prefer staying home, and it's not like they wouldn't be paid very well compared to the local salary. And besides, a lot of Indians in India are working for FAANG, and don't earn US money - I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company.
- walrus01 14d ago
  > I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company. India doesn't have the same structure, existence and prevalence of VCs with large pools of available seed round and series A money that are necessary for a start-up to acquire enough funds to realistically train a model. Particularly with the hardware/datacenter costs involved in that. There's a reason why a huge number of motivated and talented Indian people form companies outside of India.
  - torginus 14d ago
    I don't really have an special insight on India, but some of the biggest tech CEOs are Indian born and raised (Google, MS...) Surely they have the resources, connections and experience in how to build tech companies. In fact I'd be surprised if they were not involved in some capacity. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but considering they have the people, money, and connections, I would expect a lot more success stories.

petcat 14d ago

India suffers from massive tech brain-drain to USA. Also the country is severely GPU compute-constained. It's really just the same story as EU.