CHENNAI: Stressing the urgent need for India to build sustainable and sovereign artificial intelligence systems, V Kamakoti, director of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, called for the development of indigenous AI models aligned with the nation’s values, strategic interests and long-term development goals.

Speaking at the 14th ThinkEdu Conclave on Tuesday, Kamakoti said India must move beyond dependence on foreign AI systems and focus on creating ‘atmanirbhar’ or self-reliant AI models.

“We must avoid a situation where external models influence how we think, learn or run our national processes,” Kamakoti said. Speaking about Sarvam AI, he said it competes with some of the world’s most advanced frontier models and has established benchmarks for massive Indic language understanding.

His speech was followed by a panel discussion on the topic “How AI is changing education and what we need to know”. In the interaction with author Sairam Surenderasan, Pawan Goyal, professor at IIT Kharagpur, said learners should ask whether AI is helping them truly understand and enhance learning.