The AI compute capabilities of Indian universities are not in great shape for providing assistance for AI research. IIT alumni should definitely take charge to donate to their universities for funding AI research and building better AI compute infrastructure.
In one such recent case, Krishna Chivkula, an alumnus of IIT Madras donated INR 228 crore to the university, which is the largest donation ever. Another great example is Nandan Nilekani’s investment in building AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, which is enabling the best AI research currently in the country.
Meanwhile, the IITs and IISc computing infrastructure is abysmal. If more money goes toward acquiring compute, then the research from the institutions can definitely see a rise. A lot of researchers often head away from the country as there is no way foundational research can be done using such little compute availability.
Hosting models on GPUs accessible via cloud hosted APIs is not cheap. Ask researchers from Indian universities and they will tell you. For example, 8 NVIDIA A100s on …