{"id":496284,"date":"2025-01-23T02:04:52","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T20:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inc42.com\/?p=496284"},"modified":"2025-01-23T02:04:52","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T20:34:52","slug":"perplexity-rolls-out-free-subscription-to-iit-madras-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inc42.com\/buzz\/perplexity-rolls-out-free-subscription-to-iit-madras-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Perplexity Rolls Out Free Subscription To IIT Madras Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve 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,\u201d said Srinivas in a post on X.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This aligns with Srinivas\u2019 comments in December 2024, when he said he was open to \u201cfiguring out\u201d an economic structure with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to offer Perplexity Pro to Indian students, faculty and researchers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Last month, he also met PM Modi in New Delhi<\/a> and discussed the potential for AI adoption in India and across the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cgroup of people\u201d that would make India \u201cgreat in the context of AI\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d said Srinivas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201crigour\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reacting to the Perplexity cofounder\u2019s post, Indic-focussed LLM maker SarvamAI cofounder Pratyush Kumar pitched his own startup. \u201cAravind, at @SarvamAI, we are building sovereign models that combine deep reasoning and Indic language skills. Would love to have you join this mission!\u201d Kumar said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This comes a day after Srinivas stirred up a storm in the Indian AI ecosystem<\/a> after he said that Indian companies should focus on training their models from scratch, rather than finetuning existing foundational models.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While noting that \u201cthinking models\u201d are costly to train, Srinivas called on the Indian entrepreneurs to \u201cshow the world that it\u2019s capable of ISRO-like feet (sic) for AI\u201d. He was referring to the cost-effective and frugal approach of the Indian space agency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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