Uttar Pradesh's chief minister Yogi Adityanath's announcement of a ₹25,000 crore memorandum of understanding (MoU) with AI startup Puch AI has drawn sharp online criticism over the company's credentials.
Invest UP CEO Vijay Kiran Anand clarified that the MoU is non-binding and that Puch AI has been given three days to submit due diligence documents.
Puch AI's co-founder Bhatia described the company as 'well-funded' and not bootstrapped, but declined to share financial details.
Critics in the tech community have dismissed Puch AI's product as a 'wrapper' built atop existing AI models, and pointed to the company's lack of foundational model and experience in building data centres or setting up universities.
Assistant professor of computer science at IISc, Danish Pruthi, said there is no evidence of open-source models, blogs, reports, or publications that could be verified or audited by independent parties.
