ChatGPT is huge in India. These locally focused startups found a way to compete

Tauseef Ahmed & Sajid Raina | Rest of World | Nov 17, 2025

India has more than 1,600 languages and dialects, but most artificial intelligence systems cater to those that are widely spoken. OpenAI’s ChatGPT supports more than a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, the dominant language in Karnataka. Google’s Gemini can chat with users in nine Indian languages.

Spurred by their success, and keen to be a part of the rapid global transition to AI, a handful of Indian startups are building AI tools for so-called low-resource languages such as Tulu, Bodo, and Kashmiri, which have a limited online presence and few written records. The startups are having to build data sets nearly from scratch.

TuluAI holds storytelling sessions and workshops in rural areas, in which local residents — particularly women and elders — narrate their stories, or are asked to read texts and simulate everyday conversations. Participants are taught to record and label the data. Each workshop of one to two days produces over 150 hours of labeled voice and text data, Shenava said.

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By sourcing data from the ground, the community is involved in preserving linguistic diversity and advancing linguistic inclusion, Shenava said.

“Anyone can contribute. That’s how language preservation will happen,” he said. “If AI can help keep it alive, that’s worth all the effort.”

America Against China Against America

Jasmine Sun | Jasmi.news | Aug 28, 2025

No word appeared in conversation more often than neijuan (内卷), or “involution.” The term was popularized in 2020 among Chinese social media users, though it was supposedly first adapted by online intellectual Liu Zhongjing from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s book on rice farming in Indonesia. Quoting Yi-Ling Liu’s New Yorker piece on the topic:

Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (an increase in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops and innovation)... Involution is “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,” Biao told me. It is acceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose, Sisyphus spinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion Peloton.

Chinese solar companies battling to the death? Involution. High schoolers spending Saturdays out-prepping each other for the gaokao? Involution. Six hotpot restaurants side-by-side on a single mall floor? Involution. Boba delivery that somehow costs less than pickup? Dance, dance, involution.

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One theme: Chinese companies do not seem to believe in specialization and core competencies, and like to do everything in-house that they possibly can. The level of integration is both impressive and confusing. Perhaps self-reliance reduces dependencies on other firms, insulating from both political and competitive volatility.

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In a fascinating conversation on Concurrent, a Chinese investor sums up youth anxiety as follows: “In China, everyone believes the state will ultimately succeed, but no one knows whether they'll be the victor or the price paid for victory.”