At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2025, two of the AI world’s most influential voices—Pushmeet Kohli from Google DeepMind and Srinivas Narayanan from OpenAI—outlined a vision of artificial intelligence that extends far beyond chatbots and commercial hype. Their conversations revealed a shared belief that the real breakthroughs in AI will come from scientific discovery, large-scale societal impact, and a deeper engagement with India as both a development hub and a proving ground for advanced technologies.
Pushmeet Kohli, who oversees science and strategic initiatives at DeepMind, reiterated that the organisation’s guiding principle has always been scientific exploration. Rather than focusing on traditional tech metrics, DeepMind’s ambition lies in solving fundamental problems across disciplines. Kohli highlighted the staggering adoption of AlphaFold in India, with more than 180,000 students and researchers using it to study proteins and accelerate disease research. For him, this widespread scientific uptake illustrates how AI’s true power lies not in convenience features but in the capacity to reshape how entire fields work.
Kohli’s remarks arrive at a moment when the broader tech industry is increasingly driven by product cycles, subscription revenue, and the demand for rapid feature releases. Yet he insisted that DeepMind must continue to pursue moonshot scientific projects, even as its parent company pushes aggressively on consumer AI initiatives. AlphaFold has bought DeepMind invaluable time, credibility, and independence, and Kohli argued that its next breakthroughs—particularly in healthcare and drug discovery—could be even more transformative. He emphasized that AI efforts cannot be incremental; they must meaningfully redefine the way society approaches its most complex challenges. India, in his view, will play a central role in that evolution.
Srinivas Narayanan of OpenAI echoed this sentiment by placing India at the heart of the global AI rollout. He described India not merely as a market but as a testing environment unlike any other, with its linguistic diversity, enormous population, variations in literacy, and rapid adoption patterns. For Narayanan, India represents the perfect canvas for determining whether AI systems can function at scale in the real world. If AI can adapt to India’s complexity, it can adapt anywhere.
His perspective is also grounded in business realities. OpenAI is betting heavily on India’s developer ecosystem, recognising that the success of its platform depends on widespread adoption of its APIs and tools. Educational partnerships, pricing models such as ChatGPT Go, and targeted outreach reflect a strategy designed to make India a cornerstone of OpenAI’s global expansion. The sooner developers in India build on OpenAI’s models, the stronger the company’s competitive position becomes in a landscape where Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others are vying for the same attention.
Yet Narayanan’s comments also fit into a familiar pattern across big technology companies. India is both a massive opportunity and a geopolitical priority, especially as governments around the world move toward stricter AI regulations. Establishing deep roots before India finalizes its regulatory framework gives companies a head start that could shape the region’s AI trajectory for years.
The conversations at HTLS 2025 reveal a moment of alignment between two competing AI giants: both believe that the next wave of technological impact will be grounded in science, deployed responsibly at scale, and deeply intertwined with India’s unique environment. Whether through protein-folding breakthroughs or the development of AI systems that can serve a billion people, India is becoming central to the global AI story in ways the world is only beginning to recognize.
