At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Amit Sheth, founding director of IAIRO, asked 100 attendees if India could assemble 200–250 world-class researchers to build something akin to DeepSeek; only three raised their hands, with Sheth admitting two clearly did not know what they were talking about and he was unsure about the third. According to research by the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, 71% of Chinese AI researchers trained abroad return home, while 73% of high-skilled researchers do not return to India after an international move, per IISER. Sheth observed that at AAAI, NeurIPS, and EMNLP conferences, for every 20 papers from China and six or seven from the US, there was only one from India. He recalled visiting Tsinghua University in Beijing, where facilities beat anything he had seen at a US campus, funded by a scholar programme giving returning professors million-dollar labs and serious pay, while India’s equivalent schemes like the PM Professorship Programme by Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) started recently with comparatively tiny money. Tech Mahindra’s Chief Innovation Officer Nikhil Malhotra said India has been counting GPUs and models instead of contributions the rest of the world cites; India sits second globally on AI paper volume, behind China, but drops to fourth on citation influence, behind the UK, China, and the US. Sheth proposes ‘Small AI’—compact neuro-symbolic