Pranav Mistry Urges India to Focus on Next-Gen AI Models Over LLMs

Pranav Mistry, founder of TWO AI and creator of SUTRA AI models, urges India to stop trailing the West in developing large language models and instead focus on future advancements. TWO AI counts Reliance Jio among its investors.

“The next wave of models will be quantitative models and world models. These will work with structured data like transactions, weather, traffic, soil, and visual data. That’s where real AI impact will happen, not just chatbots,” he said.

Quantitative models or LQMs, will power applications in governance, Agriculture, public infrastructure and cybersecurity. “These models can predict patterns from data even in the wild, data that hasn’t been seen before. It’s not just about training on past corpora. It’s about making real-world predictions from real-time data,” said the computer scientist who owns 100+ patents in the field of AI, robotics and AR\VR.
 
Mistry's groundbreaking academic project at MIT, 'Sixth Sense,' played a key role in shaping the Samsung Galaxy Watch, foldable display technology, and virtual reality, all while he was leading Samsung's Technology & Advanced Research (STAR) Labs.

He expressed a cautious yet optimistic view on the Indian government’s AI initiative, which offers compute subsidies and grants for foundational models. “The heart is in the right place. But we must stop copying the US or China. Six months later, by the time we build an LLM, the world will have moved on. We need to think ahead, not follow,” he said. “The government should focus on where the world is going, not where it was.”

TWO AI is contemplating submitting a proposal to develop a fully India-trained version of Sutra under the government’s open call. However, Mistry warned against merely throwing money at model training without a strategic approach. “India’s AI future lies not in mimicking global models, but in building an India-first technology stack that is designed with local needs, languages, and scale in mind.”

Mistry believes that while India has the talent and potential to lead in AI, it requires strategic leadership to realize that potential. “Just saying ‘India will be number one in AI’ doesn’t make it true. We have to build it thoughtfully, securely, and for our own people,” he said.

Mistry emphasized that any model companies looking to expand into new markets like India must prioritize data localization. “All our enterprise models run on servers in Mumbai. That’s important. Enterprises, especially in banking and government, don’t want their data going outside India. And they shouldn’t,” he said.

TWO AI had previously secured $20 million in funding from Reliance Jio and South Korea's Naver Corp. The company is now aiming to raise an additional $35 million to $50 million. With an annual recurring revenue of $10 million, TWO AI expects to achieve profitability by 2026. “Our vision aligns with Jio to build AI for India. Jio understands that global models are not India-first. We work closely with their leadership, not just for business, but to shape the future of AI in India,” he said.

He said that TWO does not aim to compete with OpenAIs of the West or Krutrim, Sarvam of the East. “We don’t want to become a model company. From the very beginning, TWO never intended to compete with OpenAI or Mistral. Our business is not selling models for $1 per thousand tokens. Our core offering is solutions that enterprises can deploy securely and at scale,” Mistry said in an interview.

The company is preparing to launch Sutra AI Studio, a platform for enterprises to create AI apps and agents. Mistry also disclosed that TWO AI will soon introduce Geniya, a free India-focused search engine and AI assistant similar to Perplexity AI.

“Geniya is already live in beta. It’s not officially launched, but people are using it. We plan to go public with it this summer,” he said. “It’s built for India’s search and knowledge needs. It will let users ask questions in any language, even through voice.”

TWO AI's new reasoning model, R0, has attracted 1 million users within 30 days and more than 2,000 developer sign-ups. Mistry also noted that enterprise adoption is expanding quickly. “We have recently signed two large enterprise clients in Korea. And in India, we’ve received greenlights for government projects related to mission-critical applications.”