Rajat Arya, Founder of 169Pi, spoke with conviction about the future of artificial intelligence. He opened with a striking thought: “the gap between using and building—that’s where your next now lives.” For him, AI is not just a tool but a choice that will define how societies progress. “AI is like a parrot, your choice today decides if it becomes a crutch or superpower.” He left the audience with one lesson to learn from his experience, “We built smarter rather than bigger, and once you’ve built smarter, you can scale forever.” The line captured his philosophy: progress isn’t about size, but about clarity of design. Mr. Arya concluded with a reminder for innovators: “build something before building.” His speech was not just about AI’s power, but about responsibility. Rajat Arya is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of 169Pi, a company that focuses on artificial intelligence research and its practical use, with the goal of helping India become a major player in the global AI field. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he built ALPIE, one of the world’s most efficient large-scale reasoning models, & led projects in AI-powered education, healthcare & enterprise systems. His 32-billion-parameter model, optimised in 4-bit precision, outperforms models many times its size, including OpenAI’s 3, 4o & Claude 3. An entrepreneur at heart, Rajat earlier founded a blockchain company that launched India’s largest NFT collection, and worked at Snapchat, gaining hands-on experience in building products at a global scale. He is one of the few founders to secure a strategic deal with ISRO, where he has also spoken as a guest. Blending technology and impact, Rajat’s vision is to make advanced AI powerful, sustainable and accessible to people everywhere in the world. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx