The wrong race, India needs its own datasets, why AI can’t ‘learn’

Welcome to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin tackle the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence for The Ken.This week, Brady looked at the narrative collapse in how US tech executives react to AI development in China. Compliments that previously carried a sense of talking down at “losing” competitors are being replaced by a sense of urgency and alarm. It’s becoming clear that the US saw the race as about hardware and compute, while China was focusing on efficiency and architecture. Those two diverging views created vastly different approaches to creating this new technology.Rohin examined how India has been running after Nvidia’s GPUs, but needs to build its own datasets. It’s a consequence of the IndiaAI mission’s roots—accumulating hardware that is readily available for training and inference (as long as you can pay). Besides the rapid depreciation of GPUs, there’s another snag: if data isn’t treated as a sovereign national asset, then India isn’t taking advantage of its most significant and sustainable advantage.Finally, Praveen shared his thoughts on what’s really stopping AI from “learning”, based on Andrej Karpathy’s interpretation. Large language models can’t reflect, have memory that functions like the opposite of humans’, and don’t have a shared culture that provides a way to pass down knowledge. Most importantly, even the most powerful current models cognitively resemble young children.This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.Send us your critiques, suggestions, and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected].*Additional Reading:Western executives who visit China are coming back terrifiedhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/The missing bullet holes and Abraham Waldhttps://medium.com/@christian.dobbert/the-missing-bullet-holes-and-abraham-wald-25e68d7a870f‘Shoestring’ R&D budgets force India to rely on Chinese tech, says steel tycoonhttps://www.ft.com/content/3acd4408-9637-4a4a-9649-7456e1705e79India risks losing cultural relevance in the AI erahttps://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/india-risks-losing-cultural-relevance-in-the-ai-era/IndiaAI Mission: Dataset Over GPUshttps://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/indiaai-mission-dataset-over-gpus