As the world hurtles into 2026, one year closer to the  purported arrival of AGI, we are now ready to unveil our new project BhaSKaR.

Bhāratīya Saṃskṛti evam Kṛtrim budhimattā Rasāyaṇśālā

भारतीय संस्कृति एवं कृतिम बुद्धिमत्ता रसायनशाला

A creative laboratory for Indian Culture and Artificial Intelligence

We did not choose this name lightly. Over many conversations around the future of our world and the impact of AI on today's work and society, it became apparent to us that, while being a force of great good, AI also poses a significant threat to sovereignty and cultural identity of nations and people who don't have a seat at the table. 

To explain this, let me submit to you the idea that AI is now the internet itself. From being a technology out there in the future, AI has now become a core infrastructure component of our world. A significant majority of information that we consume or create today is AI generated. Increasingly this now includes code that runs many digital services in our world, used for commerce, communication or social interactions.

This mega factory of language, ideas, code and beliefs has replaced the internet as we know it, and once the Agentic era fully arrives the web will cease to exist. If Agentic AI proponents are to be believed and the era comes to pass, for most tasks that we do on the web, you and I will interact with AI over natural conversations.

It follows thus that all economic and cultural activities that are now digital and conducted over the internet will become possible only by accessing AI agents powered by Large Language Models.

As convenient as this sounds, take a minute to consider the flip side of this. Large Language Models have a big data imperative. Which means, Language Models will be better trained and useful for languages that have larger data sets already available.

This in turn will force communities and individuals to abandon their own languages and gravitate, even more than now, towards languages dictated by the models for which economic activities are viable. Moreover, future generations growing up in the shadow of these LLMs will grow up with a world view skewed by the dominant languages alone.

We have already seen a lot of this with the advent of the internet, but in the incoming AI land grab, this will only intensify.  In her book, the Empire of AI, Karen Hao talks about how data is the last frontier of colonisation. Just like previous era colonisers appropriated land and its resources for capitalistic outcomes, in todays world AI companies will do so with languages and data.

When languages die out, entire cultures die out as well. Language is the soul of a community, just as culture is it's physical manifestation. Take language away from a community and the body eventually ceases to exist. Seen in this light, it becomes imperative for every community, regardless of its size, to work towards building langauge models that can help preserve it's identity for posterity. 

Sovereignty is not just about protecting physical, commericial or digital infrastructure alone. In an age where the Empires of AI are rapidly encroaching on our cultural borders, sovereignty is also about preserving culture and language.

It is with this mission in mind that we have founded Bhaskar - an AI Lab in the heart of one of North India's most culturally diverse and rich cities - Ajmer. 

The idea of Bhaskar is not to build products or models alone in AI. Those will be a by-product.

At Bhaskar we want to rethink AI from an Indian angle. We want to study, be inspired and fuse modern AI development with insights from our 5000 year old cultural identity and heritage. 

Bhaskar aspires to become an anchor for research and experiments that bring creativity, culture and technology and give back to the world a new blueprint for AI. Or at the very least build a playbook for preserving sovereign identity in this age. 

Bhaskar will double down on building Small Language Models in Indic langauges, video models trained on Indic content and AI films and podcasts around Indian culture and heritage. 

We hope to produce content that will bring back to life our past heritage and stories in an engaging manner. We hope to build applications that revive an interest in Indian art, architecture and languages using AI. 

And last but not the least, we want to engage with the community around us. Which is why we are not building Bhaskar in a Tier 1 city like Bangalore, choosing instead to plant it in the middle of where India exists in its true form - a small town. 

But the choice of building Bhaskar from Ajmer was not a random one. We chose Ajmer for the role it has played since eternity. As the battleground where foreign invasions and colonial rule of India has sprung it's seeds - twice over.

Ajmer has been a pivotal stage in India’s history—from the late 12th century, when Muhammad Ghori’s campaigns culminated in the capture of Ajmer after the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 CE, to the early 17th century, when Sir Thomas Roe visited Emperor Jahangir’s court at Ajmer in 1615 CE—its political significance has been tested and reaffirmed many times.

Today, once again after 500 years, the colonial forces of AI pose an entirely new risk - the risk of India losing its cultural and language sovereignty and becoming completely dependent on LLMs trained on Western languages alone. We risk losing the insights, the nuances and the wisdom of 5000 years because we are not well represented within the Language Models and Video Models being trained. We risk becoming digital slaves to Silicon Valley and China, because we do not understand or control this new frontier of technology.

Our mission at Project Bhaskar is to connect millennia of reasoning, language, and creativity with the frontier of artificial intelligence to build culturally aware systems for everyone. This is not a short term, quick wins, easily showcased game. We have many challenges and battles to fight, many hurdles to overcome. But we are confident that only by playing a long term game, only by working long hours in the trenches will we emerge with meaningful outcomes - for ourselves and for the country.

If you are curious to learn more, interested in being a part of this new effort or just want to say hello - drop me a line on titash at adaptiv dot me.