"Indian companies are increasingly leaning on Chinese large language models (LLMs) developed by DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI to contain their artificial intelligence spends, extending India's reliance on China for cutting-edge technologies despite a long history of standoffs between the neighbors.
Puneet Kumar, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments India, said that several consumer technology startups that he has met since mid-2025 use such Chinese open-weight LLMs -- those that rely on publicly accessible parameters -- which help drive down costs by an "order of magnitude."
Because these parameters are publicly available, users can download and modify them on their own computers, in contrast to the proprietary offerings by U.S. frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Chinese open-weight LLMs can be accessed in India through service providers such as Microsoft at a fraction of the price of their American counterparts, thanks to their low cost of development.
"The U.S. models are expensive, and for a lot of basic things, you don't need them," Gupta said. "It's overkill, like trying to drive a sports car on a crowded city road.""
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence/indian-companies-look-to-chinese-llms-as-ai-costs-bite
#India #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI #China #DigitalSovereignty
Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹
npub1ez…apqv4
2026-09-21 09:13:02 UTC
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