A supply chain founder on Tuesday explained why India has not been able to build something like ChatGPT or DeepSeek. Zenaca Consulting founder Amarpreet Singh highlighted key reasons behind this gap, pointing to talent migration, career shifts, and systemic issues in engineering education.
“Someone asked me, why isn’t anyone from India able to build something like ChatGPT or DeepSeek?” Singh wrote in a post. The common assumption, he noted, is that India has some of the best software engineers globally. But the reality, according to him, is more nuanced.
Singh outlined three key reasons. First, India’s brightest engineers often migrate to the US, where they rise to leadership positions in global tech giants like Google and Microsoft. “Our best engineers move out to the US—we have CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and many more tech giants,” Singh pointed out.
Second, the next layer of talented engineers rarely stick to core technical fields. “They end up building great companies like Flipkart, Zomato, Blinkit, and many more. All of these have very little relation with the computer science they studied in IITs or other colleges,” Singh observed. While these companies are entrepreneurial success stories, they don’t necessarily advance deep tech or AI research.
Third, Singh highlighted a systemic issue with engineering education in India. Many students enroll in engineering programs due to societal expectations rather than genuine interest. “In India, only a very few students from early school or colleges develop interest for actual engineering. They enter engineering colleges just because Sharma ji ka beta has also done engineering,” Singh remarked, critiquing the trend of following engineering as a default career path without a passion for innovation.
A new Chinese AI model, developed by Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek, has made waves in the American AI industry by surpassing some of OpenAI’s top-performing models. It has even overtaken ChatGPT as the leading app on the iOS store and outpaced Meta in the realm of open-source AI tools.
Investor Dilip Kumar recently voiced his concerns about India’s tech culture. In a tweet, he said: “A bunch of influential folks are organizing Asia’s ‘largest AI event’ with Bollywood celebrities, cricketers, and YouTube influencers. These are people who haven't written a single line of code in their lives.”
Kumar stressed that true AI leadership doesn’t come from star-studded panels but from “PhDs, engineers, founders—people who write code, build models, and deploy systems at scale.” He emphasized that nations like the US and China didn’t become AI leaders through glitzy events but by investing in university labs, open-source projects, and grassroots tech ecosystems.