Jaspreet Bindra: The K-shaped trajectory of AI offers India a big opportunity

There have been two pivotal moments in the evolution of artificial intelligence in the last three years: the ChatGPT moment in November 2022 that jump-started the AI age and the DeepSeek moment this January which upended the narrative of high costs and centralized AI, replacing it with a story of lower costs and better democratized AI. While US tech stocks, especially Nvidia’s, tanked the week after, investors have kept their faith in US Big Tech firms that have announced around $350 billion of AI capex just this year, even as OpenAI and SoftBank double down on America’s $500 billion Stargate project. Meanwhile, there is DeepSeek and a rash of Chinese models like the Kimi K1.5, Kwen 2.5, Doubao 21.5 Pro, with their open-source-led innovation driving the downward cost slope of the K’s lower arm. Much like in economics, this K-shaped curve will prevail for a while—with rich countries and even richer Big Tech companies pouring resources into the K’s upper arm to build models housed in giant clouds, while scrappy startups and emerging countries drive the lower arm further down with models hosted by mobile handsets and other devices. Upper-K players will endeavour to finesse reasoning models and achieve artificial general intelligence and super intelligence as key differentiators, with control, scaling and monetization as priorities; they will offer high-end, closed-source AI products.