Generative AI demands vast computational resources and funding—two things Indian academia sorely lacks. According to Amit Singhi of IBM Research India, this structural gap is driving PhD students away from prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and toward industry labs like IBM.
Speak with Singhi, and you'll hear a recurring theme: grants are rare, compute is scarce, and the scale required for cutting-edge AI research is simply not available in most university settings. "Industry partnerships are the answer," he says, pointing to IBM's collaborative model that offers students access to supercomputing clusters and real-world datasets.
The trend is reshaping India's research landscape. Young scholars increasingly view corporate labs as the only viable route to work on frontier AI problems. For Indian academia, the message is clear: without urgent investment in infrastructure and funding, the brain drain to industry will only accelerate.