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Jonathan Ross, Founder and CEO of AI inferencing platform Groq, believes coding literacy, focused on artificial intelligence, will fuel the entrepreneurial spirit in India and massively expand the country’s startup base. At TechSparks 2025, YourStory's flagship startup-tech summit, advocated for India to focus on AI applications rather than building large frontier models. “We don’t need 50 different foundational models on the planet. We need two or three,” Ross said in a fireside chat with Sangeeta Bavi, COO, YourStory. Historically, one company builds a platform, and the whole ecosystem benefits. “Those building on top of it (platform) are making more money than the platform itself. Application layer is where most value will be,” the Groq founder said. “If I were in India, I would be focusing on the application layer,” Ross added. He advised that India should leverage unique businesses built in the country, grow them and replicate them globally. “For example, you have these real-time sub-10-minute delivery systems that don't exist anywhere in the world. Now, try replicating that globally. One of the reasons that worked was the low cost of labour. Well, AI is going to drive down the cost of labour, so there's an opportunity there.” AI has drastically shortened the time between conceptualisation and building the tech stack required to run it. “The real change will come when you have an idea for a business, and within a day or two, you have a working software application for it. That's a sea change in a way humanity has operated,” Ross said. He illustrated a couple of examples of how fast things are changing because of AI. Until recently, in any given Y Combinator cohort, one or two companies grew at 10% a week. Now, 50% of the batch is growing 10% a week, he noted. "That's what AI is bringing. Earlier startups had to hire an entire technology team. It took longer for the code to work. You had to do all the prototyping. And now all you have to do is prompt AI,” he said. He asserted that even the human resource team at Groq now codes. “None of them knew how to code before AI-assisted coding came into being." “Imagine what coding literacy will do to India’s 1.4 billion people,” remarked Ross. Ross, a former Googler who designed the core elements of the internet giant's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) between 2013-15, founded Groq in 2016. Groq designs LPU (language processing unit) chips to run large language models at a breakneck speed and offers a cloud platform (or API) for AI inferencing. The AI hardware cum software company is currently valued at $6.9 billion. (Edited by Kanishk Singh)
