I wanted to share a few thoughts on SamaA's comments in Delhi, Foundational Models, India's position and what could we possibly do as a nation. I think a lot of people in the ecosystem are missing the forest for the trees, that is, we are fixating on OpenAI's lead with GPT4 and the lack of FM's in India of equivalent capability. Perhaps a few valiant efforts using OSS alternatives as a base will be able to match it in the next 6-12 months. However, SamaA has repeated time and again that his and OpenAI's sole mission is to invent Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and all their activities GPT4, ChatGPT, Tools, monetization, and Microsoft Partnerships are just meant to that end. Hence, if we truly wish to compete, we must go where the puck will be down the line, and not where it is today. The 3 most important ingredients for that goal are People, Data, and Compute, which is why OpenAI had to sell out its original vision of being truly "Open" and raise from Microsoft. But given the pace of innovation over the last few months, there might be some alternative paths for a country like ours, assuming there will be no large pools of capital available from VCs, Ultra HNI's, or the Govt. 50 years ago, we achieved a major feat in the Nuclear race, Project Smiling Buddha. A scrappy team of Indian Scientists conducted our very first test of an Atomic Bomb, under utmost secrecy and against immense pressure from the Americans. Perhaps, what is needed today is a similar effort, but we need not be defensive about it, or do it under secret. But a response must be made, especially to something that could be an existential threat. Coming back to the 3 most important ingredients - People, Data and Compute. Perhaps this could be a way - ** Project Laughing Buddha ** A nationwide effort to create India's version of truly Open Protocols based Foundational Models with an explicitly stated goal towards Artificial General Intelligence, which could perhaps be through a combination of hundreds of Foundational Models, instead of one large one. - The project code, weights & temperatures of FMs are in the public domain, and ownership - Team of 1000 of India's top AI Researchers, Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and RLHF Engineers organized through best Open Source practices - Decentralised GPU compute donated through millions of idle devices by Indian citizens aggregated through nodes akin to the SETI Project - Datasets for training that are donated by leading Startups, Citizen Groups, Open Govt Data, and Citizens If it is successful, we could perhaps protect our Data and AI Sovereignty and provide the foundations necessary for 100K Startups to build and scale on top, without being subservient to other organizations or countries.