‘Behind by a century...’: Reddit user says India missed the AI bus and is just ‘outsourced service provider’ 

The “Sputnik moment” following the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese competitor to OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool, has triggered discussion about India’s position in the cutting-edge work in the arena of artificial intelligence. 

The development has triggered a debate on India’s position in the AI development area with a Reddit user pointing out that the “ship has long sailed.” 

The user, who claims to be a student at one of the premier institutes of the country, in a post said the amount of fundamental research being done in the domain of transformer architecture and hardware-level execution of the same is beyond insane in countries like USA and China. 

“Particularly China, since they are behind on hardware, their only hope is to open source all their developments to undermine American company’s leverage on the market. If you look at the CSE papers coming of China from past 2 years, you will realize we have been left behind not by decade, but a century,” he added. 

The ship has sailed and one more time we are just the outsourced service provider/data market for the west, the user wrote. 

The post triggered a massive discussion on the Indian IT companies and start-ups with several users criticising India’s academic approach to AI. 

“We have never caught any bus train or even cycle of the tech revolution... all self patting is for the it service revenue... in real terms we are nowhere near anything the world is achieving,” wrote one user. 

Another user wrote, “India’s largest organisations have zero interest in research of any kind, the government's budgets for research outside of pharma is limited, and the education and social system does not encourage research, but rather engineering and services. Even prior to this, when Blockchain technology was the research fad, I don't remember seeing any paper from India.” 

Our startups only busy making api wrappers for SaaS instead of doing anything meaningful, slammed another.  

IITs might drop something in the next 5 to 10 years, possibly just to grab headlines,wrote another. 

The release of DeepSeek, saw $1trillion wiped from Nasdaq -- the leading US tech index—amid a race for domination in artificial intelligence. Nvidia, a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, lost nearly $600 billion off its market value. Google’s parent company lost $100 billion and Microsoft $7 billion. Nvidia’s fall was the biggest in US stock market history. 

The DeepSeek AI assistant also topped the Apple app store in the US and UK over the weekend, above OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

US President Donald Trump said DeepSeek should be a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win”. 

Recently at Davos 2025, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chairperson of HCLTech, said that while Indian companies are focusing on practical AI use cases, they aren't yet at the cutting edge of AI research. She argued that for India to lead in AI, investment in academic institutions is vital. Cutting-edge AI solutions typically emerge from top universities, which then drive commercial innovation.