Infosys Co-Founder Backs View on Why India Has Not Produced a ChatGPT Rival
Kris Gopalakrishnan endorsed a viral argument that Indian IT firms are structured for services, not costly frontier AI development.
The debate over India's role in the global artificial intelligence race has gained fresh momentum after Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan endorsed a widely discussed social media post explaining why India has yet to produce a ChatGPT-like AI company.
The conversation emerged amid growing concerns about access to advanced AI technologies following Anthropic's decision to restrict foreign nationals from using its latest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The move reportedly followed export-control directives issued by US authorities citing national security concerns.
Against this backdrop, an X user named Piramal, who describes himself as working on payment agents for the emerging machine economy, argued that India's major IT companies—including TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL—should not be criticised for failing to build a global AI model comparable to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
His post caught significant attention after Gopalakrishnan shared it and wrote, "Thanks for the right perspective."
According to Piramal, expecting Indian IT services companies to compete directly with firms such as OpenAI or Anthropic misunderstands the very purpose and structure of these businesses.
His first argument focused on the economics of frontier AI development. He noted that building advanced AI models has evolved beyond a software challenge and become a massive infrastructure and capital-intensive race. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are able to spend billions on computing resources because they are backed by technology giants such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Indian IT companies operate under a different model, he argued. As publicly listed firms, they are expected to deliver stable profits and shareholder returns rather than pursue high-risk investments with uncertain outcomes.
"If an Indian IT CEO announced tomorrow that they were cutting shareholder dividends by 80 per cent to buy 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips to build a speculative Indic LLM, the stock would crash 30 per cent by noon. Their corporate structure is legally optimized for steady margins, not venture-capital roulette," he wrote.
Piramal's second point highlighted the broader economic significance of India's IT services industry. He argued that the sector generates more than $200 billion annually in foreign exchange earnings, providing critical support to India's economy through export revenues.
"The Indian IT sector brings in over $200B+ in foreign currency annually. This massive influx of US Dollars is the primary anchor that stabilizes the Rupee, builds India's foreign exchange reserves & gives the RBI the geopolitical leverage to purchase Russian oil/navigate global inflation," he wrote.
While this contribution is widely acknowledged, experts also point out that long-term economic growth requires greater innovation and globally competitive products. India's progress in innovation rankings has improved over the years, but challenges remain in areas such as private-sector research spending and high-technology manufacturing.
Employment was the third pillar of Piramal's argument. He said the IT sector directly employs more than five million people while supporting millions more through related industries. According to him, the industry has been instrumental in expanding India's middle class, particularly in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
"It is the single largest escalator that took the Indian middle class from tier-2 & tier-3 towns & gave them global purchasing power," he wrote.
Finally, Piramal argued that India's biggest AI opportunity may lie not in building foundational models but in helping enterprises deploy them effectively. He believes Indian IT firms possess deep expertise in integrating complex technologies, fine-tuning models with enterprise data and managing large-scale deployments.
"When the hype settles, the companies that make the most consistent money are not the ones selling the raw steel (the LLM makers); it's the construction crews building the actual skyscrapers (the IT service integrators)," he wrote.
The discussion has reignited a broader debate over India's AI future—whether the country should focus on creating homegrown foundational models or leverage its long-established strengths in technology services, implementation and enterprise innovation.
