Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at IIT Madras, has been named among TIME magazine’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. He joins notable figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman in receiving this recognition. Khapra is acknowledged for his significant research in natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on Indian languages.
Unlike many leaders of AI companies, Khapra focuses on academia. He co-founded AI4Bharat, which provides open-source AI tools and data for Indian languages. According to TIME, most Indian voice technology startups rely on his datasets.
Khapra’s AI4Bharat lab found Western AI models excel in popular languages like Hindi and Bengali but struggle with less common ones. To improve this, they visited nearly 500 districts across India, recording thousands of hours of speech from diverse backgrounds in all 22 official languages.
His contributions are vital to the government’s Bhashini mission, using AI for regional language digital services. International tech companies also use AI4Bharat’s language data to improve AI for Hindi, Marathi, and other languages.
Mitesh Khapra states, “Fifteen years ago, most Indian PhD students in language tech worked on English. Now, with new datasets, more focus on Indian languages.”
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The TIME 100 AI list is a renowned award honouring top researchers, business leaders, and policymakers shaping AI’s future.
