Times Now Summit 2025 I Episode 1 Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm

Yeah, I think first of all, thank you so much and thank you so much for having me here. I do agree we are talking now about the India that goes beyond the top cities, and that is exactly the opportunity of India. It is continuously being proven that up till a certain point of time, let's say the last 10 or 20 years, the big cities used to have a large percentage of GDP contribution, and now that has reached the tier 5 and tier 6 cities as well. And maybe 'India' is not the correct word to pronounce, but 'Bharat' is. And the good thing I want to also tell here is, and this is the important thing, I personally believe by calling that we are building for India and separately for Bharat, you also sort of become un-inclusive or it is not wholesome to call out that you're building two separate things. But it is rather your own customer that you are addressing in different geographies. So building for Bharat and keeping Bharat ahead for 2047, I truly admire that you could take a stand, and I'm sure it will go a long way. So thank you for that.

First of all, thank you, Mihir, for calling that out. I go to engineering college convocations and I tell students that when you are recruited by a company that is serving international customers, there is a joy in that, you get a little more money than a normal job. When you work for a country and companies belonging to that country, you're actually growing that country. When you solve your own country's problem, you're growing all of us together. So in your life, maybe 20 years back, it was not an option because the better option was inevitably in a commercial sense and reward sense. But I can say in the last 10 years, this country has dramatically changed, and we as young Indians should not just think of what we can have outside India, but we should think: what if I try to create an opportunity or solution to the opportunity in India? That will do two things: you will get the reward of the country's economy, and you will also be able to solve for what our country's needs are. And that, I believe, is the first and foremost element. India, which traditionally was deprived of the talent to solve for India's problems, has now unleashed enough of it. The very Startup India, the very Digital India initiative, our honorable Prime Minister continues to pursue that, and then we continue to see every year more elements show up. This is a classic example of it, that the government or the leadership of this country is able to respect and honor the people who are trying to solve bottom-up the problems that this country has. And now, every foreigner who comes to India sees the payment system, sees the digital infrastructure, even the commerce elements that we are talking about. So service deliveries, digital service deliveries, these are very phenomenal global experiences that we're building in India. So talent exists, opportunity exists, and now the viable business models and the companies that have been able to be successful with it are inspiring even a generation ahead of us, and an even larger generation, I'd say, to solve for even further problems. So now you're talking about space startups, which was a very interesting thing to guess, because earlier you were building something very visible next to you—food delivery, payments, these are very visible problems. Space is a little farther away in your thought process that you'll solve for it, but it is so good and inspiring to see the young generation of our country is able to see the problems which are long-term fruit-bearing, not short-term gratification only.

Obviously, there is no doubt about it that AI's capabilities are so revolutionary, and more or less, I would guess that they are underestimated by many because not many are playing with it. Only a set of people who are very early adopter, change-agent sort of people are using it. To give you a clue, if you were using the internet in '94, '95, '96, it is that era. It is not even 2000. In '94, '95, remember, some of you would remember the Lynx browser, which was a text-only browser. So today's AI is a text-only AI, literally. Yesterday we saw the first image AI get launched, and look at the excitement the world is having. So the text AI was the '94, '95, '96 of the internet. Now we are getting images, then we'll get videos, then we'll get multimedia, then we'll get the experience which is like, 'Oh my God, how could I live without it?' experience. So right now it is fitting in to solve certain elements of our work. Over the period, it will become a significant element of our work, meaning without it, it won't be possible, like a smartphone. We will feel it's an AI support system. So this is a revolution of our times, and just like the internet or smartphone revolution, it will be bigger than the previous revolutions. And like you said, the fight is going on between two countries right now, but at the same point of time, India has the opportunity to build a sovereign model, an India foundation model. But the challenge is the race is so fast right now. The race has accelerated for the features and nuances that maybe the open-source revolution that is happening on both sides of the world, we would ride that to build a foundation model. So there is a lot yet to be done.

Okay, so I remember somebody tweeted on the internet when R1 got released. R1 is DeepSeek's R1 model, and the person said, 'Wow, we're busy delivering food while somebody is building R1.' But this is exactly what I want everybody, as an audience or innovators or business players, to know. It's a state of life: when you are a teenager, you don't do the job that adults do. That ecosystem has continuously grown ahead of us in terms of timeline, maturity, resources, and scale versus our ecosystem. The good thing is that you are expecting from us. You don't expect this from Europe, you don't expect this from Turkey, you don't expect this from even the nearest population, whether Indonesia or Pakistan, at all. My point is that we are at least, as a part of our global ecosystem of technology and capability on the back of the talent of India, in the race. Yes, I can never be saying that we will do enough if we were literally neck-to-neck with, let's say, China, which is the next point of milestone or thing to benchmark upon. Then also we will not be satisfied because there is something called 'us ahead'. If we were in the US, then we will say the same thing that somebody is ahead. So the race continues. At the same point of time, I'm happy that we are part of the race, and I'm sad that the amount of things that we have to do to that milestone are so many that maybe in the AI race, we will have to be finding out our success in a way that this is the last frontier where we were number three. In the next frontier, why not be the top spot and lead the world?