Sops, DeepSeek drive local firms to work on foundation AI models

The DeepSeek challenge combined with government sops have turbocharged local startups into building India’s own foundational and fine-tuned AI models.Fractal Analytics is planning to open source its ‘Ramanujan’ reasoning model. Scientist Pranav Mistry’s startup TWO AI, funded by Reliance and based in Silicon Valley, will be releasing the ‘SUTRA-R0’ model this week using enhancements from DeepSeek and its own dual-transformer architecture, bringing down model cost to just $3.5 million.

The government’s subsidised common compute facility…