The Download: India's AI independence, and predicting future epidemics

Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap has opened largely because India has chronically underinvested in R&D, institutions, and invention. Meanwhile, since no one native language is spoken by the majority of the population, training language models is far more complicated than it is elsewhere. So when the open-source foundation model DeepSeek-R1 suddenly outperformed many global peers, it struck a nerve. This launch by a Chinese startup prompted Indian policymakers to confront just how far behind the country was in AI infrastructure--and how urgently it needed to respond.