Vivek Shivakumar Hotti

Capitalism is the (american) religion. Wealth is the new god. Hustle is the new prayer. And motivation men are the new pastors. Wall street is the pilgrimage. - via @prvkhvr

@the2ndfloorguy Vocal for Local

i built one for myself, dramatically playing AajTak news music before every meeting 🚨

@AnishA_Moonka This is good, but $1.2 billion is still less. We need a pot of atleast north of $200 - $300 Bil, easy. Access to capital and the resourceshas to be democratic, not bureaucratic. We should encourage founders, individuals & companies to take moonshots.

If you're an AI startup in India, renting processing power from the government to train your model costs about $0.7 per hour. The same hardware on Amazon Web Services costs $3.7. On Microsoft Azure, $6.6. The Indian government is subsidizing AI infrastructure at rates that would make most Western startups do a double-take. I read all 26 pages of the white paper this tweet links to. The numbers inside are wild. The IndiaAI Mission has a budget of about $1.2 billion over five years, approved in March 2024. Almost half of that, roughly $500 million, goes straight to building the processing power AI companies need to train their models. The original plan was to deploy 10,000 processors. By December 2025, they had 38,000 running. 3.8x what they promised. A government open call in January 2025 pulled 506 proposals. The four startups picked first were Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, and Gan AI. Eight more were added by September. India now has 12 separate teams building AI models, ranging from tiny ones for basic chatbots to massive ones rivaling those from the US and China. They cover language, voice, vision, medical diagnosis, material science, and even brain-computer interfaces. The one I keep coming back to is Sarvam AI. They raised $41 million from Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. In May 2025, they released a model built on top of a French AI system (Mistral Small) and customized for Indian languages. It got roasted online. Critics said it was a foreign model in Indian clothing. So they went back and built Sarvam-105B completely from scratch, using Indian hardware under the government mission. It outperformed China's DeepSeek-R1 on certain tests, even though it was a model six times larger. Both were released for anyone to download and use in March 2026. There's something else buried in the paper I haven't seen another country try at this scale. India is building a copyright system specifically for AI training data. Under a December 2025 government proposal, AI companies can train their models on any copyrighted content they can legally access, books, articles, music, anything. Creators cannot say no. But the moment an AI product makes money, royalties are collected by a centralized government body and distributed back to creators. Singapore allows AI companies to use content without payment. China requires strict consent before training. India is trying a middle path, and publishers are already calling it forced participation. Stanford's AI Vibrancy Index, which measures a country's overall AI strength across research, talent, infrastructure, and investment, ranked India third globally in 2025. Up from seventh in 2023. But the actual scores tell you how far the gap still is: US at 79, China at 37, India at 22. And India's $1.2 billion budget sits next to China's $47.5 billion semiconductor fund and Saudi Arabia's $100 billion Project Transcendence. India is currently spending 40x less than the frontrunners. This white paper is the most detailed public bet yet that smart infrastructure design can close that gap.

@aviralbhat Not in India though. You rot teaching in a college. Patience pays off where it has value.

Many of my IITB friends who went for PhDs in the US had years of study while all of us started work Our incomes grew while they went along on student researcher comps One of them just called me to ask what I think about a $10M offer from a large AI lab Patience paying big time

@arpit_bhayani Very based

You become the average of the five creators you follow most.

@whimsicalpee This is so so true

A mentor once told me this: Life will test you with the same challenge until you learn the lesson. The same fight in every relationship. The same burnout in every job. The same regret in every missed chance. Until you do the inner work, the outer world won’t change.

@peeleraja I think you forgot the /s

Demis Hassabis recently visited the Computer Science department of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a Nobel laureate and Turing award winning computer scientist. Yet, he could not crack the IITJEE - you need to be under rank 81 in JEE Advanced to go to IIT Bombay Computer Science department. This is the power of IITJEE!

@aditnotfound Go Mumbai!

we're renting the coolest villa in mumbai for 16 builders for a hacker house. forge is a 5 day founder residency running from march 1-5. you come in with your craziest idea, you leave with something real. it's gonna be 2 days of building followed by mentorship from YC and EF backed founders who'll give you brutal honest feedback, professional content for you and your startup and a demo day where you pitch to the Best VCs in India. we cover your entire stay, food, unlimited redbull, everything. (no equity taken, no costs) applications closing soon on feb 24th. stop sitting on the thing you can't stop thinking about. comment "FORGE" if you want the link to apply.

Sales is the most seductive tarpit for founders. You feel productive because revenue moves, but you're trading leverage for busywork. My co-founder staged an intervention on me. I cut calls, pushed to self-serve, and more customers converted without me. Sales has a ceiling. Product doesn't.

bangalore's blooming🌸

Hey @krandiash why was @cartesia missing at the India AI Summit?

@maitreya_wagh @bolna_dev It's really interesting to come across the use cases where Voice AI can be used.

Maybe the real reason we built @bolna_dev was to save our juniors from the trauma of reminding people to attend their college fest🤷‍♂️ True PMF achieved!

@ADHDForReal Definitely happens with me for coffee.

this is why i never worry about competition.

We were honoured to host Sir Demis Hassabis at IISc today for deeply insightful discussions!

Drop by the YuVerse booth to see how we’re turning AI into measurable business impact. Hall 3, Booth 3F.12 Discover our enterprise-ready solutions and experience real-world AI in action. Learn more about our products at 👉 yuverse.ai #AI #IndiaAIImpactSummit2026

The energy at the #IndiaAIImpactSummit2026 is electric. In just 2 days, we’ve had 350+ walk-ins at our first WA Concierge Experience Centre - with deeply engaging conversations. Excited for what’s ahead! #ResponsibleAI #PeoplePlanetProgress @OfficialINDIAai

Drop by the YuVerse booth to see how we’re turning AI into measurable business impact. Hall 3, Booth 3F.12 Discover our enterprise-ready solutions and experience real-world AI in action. Learn more about our products at 👉 yuverse.ai #AI #yuverse

Yuverse is a full stack AI Company. Really exciting what they are doing here. Visit : Hall 3, Booth 3F.12 #yuverse #fullstackAI

@BeingPractical So true

Most people who want to grow professionally in life want ownership, accountability and responsibility at work. It's very difficult to get in large organisations, as power is concentrated with few at the top. In most startup roles, it comes in by default to you; one doesn't need to ask. Just that only a few know how to own up and deliver with that - it differentiates a future leader from an employee mindset. In startups - you can win as much as you are willing to, or what you decide to settle with!