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Notes -
There are plenty of serious tech investments in India. But sometimes western VC's - such as "Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million" - are simply idiots.
But it's also worth recognizing - as every engineer in India does - the distinction between product and service companies. The vast majority of Indian software employment is at service companies like Infosys. These engineers are paid a lot less and are not very good. If you live in the west they are probably your only interaction with Indian software engineers. The idea of the service companies building a ChatGPT competitor is laughable, but they can certainly help migrate from one HR software provider to another. The price difference between them and a western engineer is where this dumb VC got the idea of ChatGPT for $10M from.
But in reality, OpenAI spent $8M on cloud compute alone in 2017. Indian engineers capable of building Indian ChatGPT might cost 30-40% less in BLR than in SF. So if you want to start Indian OpenAI on a budget, the budget is upwards of $600M compared to OpenAI's initial budget of $1B. That's a discount but not much of one.
There is serious tech investment in India, but it's mostly by western companies or inside big Indian companies (e.g. Ola). Salaries for comparable engineers are higher than in Europe, a bit less than in the US. But there's plenty of important and technically difficult internal projects being executed.
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