It's heartening to see wisps of the nascent Indian tech community waking up to the long-term strategic significance of AI capabilities, and the Indian government striving to offer support. I wish the very best to those diving in, and for the rest of this discussion will assume they succeed. What then?
No technology can be sustained on an island of excellence. It really matters what sits below and above in the stack; to push capabilities in one layer you are often enabled only by pushing capabilities in the layer above/below. Otherwise the impedance mismatch causes too much friction (forgive the mixed metaphor). I can offer several examples to buttress the point if need be (cite: DeepSeek/OpenAI, Alan Kay, Joel Spolsky, Apple vertical integration, etc). What does this mean for Indian AI?
Consider the stack below. AI runs atop computers, and one needs to h