Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw speaks during an interview, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Annual Meeting, in Davos, Switzerland.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said that producing massive large language models (LLMs) did not necessarily give countries a geopolitical “edge” and that the return on the massive investments being made in AI technologies would go to countries that were able to deploy them profitably.
The boom in countries with massive investment “might be leading to a situation” where the firms investing in the AI craze “go bust”, Mr. Vaishnaw said at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday (January 20, 2025).
Follow the World Economic Forum 2026 LIVE
“If you look at the way AI is shaping geopolitics, what can a country which has a very large model, let’s say without taking any names, can it switch off that model?” Mr. Vaishnaw asked. “Fair, switch it off. What will happen to a country like India? We have our own bouquet of models which can be used for 95% of our work. So does creating a large model give you geopolitical power? I don’t think so.” The return on investment would depend on deployment capabilities, where India was well-positioned to take a lead by helping firms around the world integrate AI into their processes, Mr. Vaishnaw said.
“It might actually be causing certain conditions where the people who are creating those large models might go bankrupt in the coming years. You never know … If you have a 50 billion parameter model, you can deploy it using one GPU. If you have a 30 billion parameter model, which is absolutely good for 80% of your work, you don’t even require a GPU. Where is the geopolitical thing in that? You have a large number of CPUs working in the entire world, and custom silicon products are coming from an amazing number of companies and countries where you wouldn’t need to be dependent on any particular country. So the so-called geopolitical edge that you are probably hinting at is not there,” he said.
Tech meetings
Mr. Vaishnaw met with several tech executives from the semiconductor and AI industries. He met Joel Kaplan, chief global officer at Meta Platforms, LLC, the parent of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The Minister discussed the protection of “social media users from deepfakes and AI generated content” with Mr. Kaplan, the IT Ministry said in a release. He also met IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and representatives from Google.
At another discussion in Davos, Mr. Vaishnaw spoke of the AI Impact Summit scheduled next week in New Delhi, where he said India would launch a “UPI-like” repository of tools for AI.
Kavita Bhatia, the chief operating officer of the summit, recently told The Hindu that this collection “will be a repository of all the successful use cases [for AI] which can also be easily replicated” by other countries.
Published – January 21, 2026 06:07 pm IST
