AI & Quantum: Things continue to speed up

Has the timeline just sped up? January-February 2025 already seems to be like an era in itself. First was the DeepSeek tornado that flattened US stocks and created a global stock market loss in the region of $1 trillion. We are still waiting to see if that is going to change market dynamics totally. Then came ChatGPT 4.5 which marks the end of an era because in the future there will be no explicit chain-of-thought reasoning. ChatGPT 5 is expected to “merge advanced reasoning with human-like interaction”. Interestingly Claude 3.7 Sonnet was released with rave reviews while Grok-3 came with 10x more computing power than Grok-2, according to Elon Musk. Meanwhile OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that they are out of GPUs post-4.5! That has been leading to delays. Looks like their products will continue to get more expensive. 

While the AI world has already hotted up, quantum appears to be next. Microsoft’s Majorna claims major quantum breakthroughs and we could have a quantum computer in this decade only. This comes after a series of breakthroughs by its rival Google. Their Willow quantum chip which came at the end of 2024 also showed promise. AWS has come out with the Ocelot quantum chip. Both the AI and quantum fields are seeing great competition.

The India story

India is yet to catch up in the AI-quantum fields. Demonetization did lead to UPI becoming a global leader. Jio’s broadband revolution put the smartphone in the hands of the rural masses. The pandemic saw techceleration and India going in for a tech upgrade. That itself put India at a point that it could benefit from future revolutions.

India always follows a slightly different trajectory from the rest of the world. The computer revolution missed rural India. The first American dotcom boom and bust generally gave us the pass. Recently Reliance Jio came out with plans for a cloud PC which would be priced at ₹15,000. Jio Cloud services would power this. Would this lead to another computing revolution? One cannot really say when it comes to India. 

Most of the tech breakthroughs in India come from the government and not the private sector. The Aadhaar ecosystem is among the best such systems in the world. The JAM (Jan Dhan Aadhaar Mobile) trinity is a superhit. UPI is a world beater. There has been a great push to expand IITs and IIITs for engineering talent. There is always some scheme or the other like the PLI ones that push some part of tech manufacturing. If government, academia and industry all fired together at full capacity, then India would end up leapfrogging many countries.