India chases 'DeepSeek moment' with homegrown AI models

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (C) takes a group photo with AI company leaders at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026 (Ludovic MARIN)Fledgling Indian artificial intelligence companies showcased homegrown technologies this week at a major summit in New Delhi, underpinning big dreams of becoming a global AI power.But analysts said the country was unlikely to have a "DeepSeek moment" -- the sort of boom China had last year with a high-performance, low-cost chatbot -- any time soon.Still, building custom AI tools could bring benefits to the world's most populous nation.At the AI Impact Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded three new models released by Indian companies, along with other examples of the country's rising profile in the field."All the solutions that have been presented here demonstrate the power of 'Made in India' and India's innovative qualities," Modi said Thursday.One of the startups making a buzz at the five-day summit attended by world leaders and top technology CEOs was Sarvam AI, which this week released two large language models it says were trained from scratch in India.Its models are optimised to work across 22 Indian languages, says the company, which received government-subsidised access to advanced computer processors.The five-day summit, which wraps up Friday, is the fourth annual international meeting to discuss the risks and rewards of the fast-growing AI sector.It is the largest yet and the first in a developing country, with Indian businesses striking deals with US tech giants to build large-scale data centre infrastructure to help train and run AI systems.Another Indian company that drew attention with product debuts this week include the Bengaluru-based Gnani.ai, which introduced its Vachana speech models at the summit.Trained on more than a million hours of audio, Vachana models generate natural-sounding voices in Indian languages that can process customer interactions and allow people to interact with digital services out loud.Job disruption and redundancies, including in India's huge call centre industry, have been one key focus of discussions at the Delhi summit.- 'Biggest market' -The government-supported BharatGen initiative, led by a group based at a university in Mumbai, also released a new multilingual AI model this week.So-called sovereign AI has become a priority for many countries hoping to reduce dependence on US and Chinese platforms while ensuring that systems respect local regulations including on data privacy.AI models that succeed in India "can be deployed all over the world", Modi said on Thursday.But experts said the sheer computational might of the United States would be hard to match."Despite the headline pledges, we don't expect India to emerge as a frontier AI innovation hub in the near term," said Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia research at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft."Its more realistic trajectory is to become the world's largest AI adoption market, embedding AI at scale through digital public infrastructure and cost-efficient applications," she said.Prihesh Ratnayake, head of AI initiatives at think-tank Factum, told AFP that the new Indian AI models were "not really meant to be global"."They're India-specific models, and hopefully we'll see their impact over the coming year," he said."Why does India need to build for the global scale? India itself is the biggest market."And Nanubala Gnana Sai, a MARS fellow at the Cambridge AI Safety Institute, said that homegrown models could bring other benefits.Existing models, even those developed in China, "have intrinsic bias towards Western values, culture and ethos -- as a product of being trained heavily on that consensus", Sai told AFP.India already has some major strengths including "technology diffusion, eager talent pool and cheap labour", and dedicated efforts can help startups pivot to artificial intelligence, he said."The end-product may not 'rival' ChatGPT or DeepSeek on benchmarks, but will provide leverage for the Global South to have its own stand in an increasingly polarised world."uzm-kaf-abh/ami/abs