Matt Deitke, a 24-year-old AI prodigy, was recently hired at a record US$250 million (roughly Rs.2250 crores), payable over four years, by Meta Platforms Inc. Deitke had turned down Meta’s initial offer of US$125 million (roughly Rs. 1125 crores); Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to personally persuade Deitke, and double his offer, before Deitke agreed to join. Deitke’s is not an isolated case; according to insiders, Zuckerberg has compiled a list of talented researchers working in Silicon Valley’s AI labs, who are being offered packages in excess of US$100 million (roughly Rs.900 crores) to defect to Meta.

The tech billionaires of the last generation, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few, were all self-made, and created value out of nothing. India, which produces more than two crore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduates annually, boasts of no similar success story. No one can deny our talent; top US tech companies, Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Alphabet (Google) (Sundar Pichai), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), T-Mobile (Srinivas Gopalan, Micron Technology (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora), and Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Reshma Kewalramani), are helmed by Indians.

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Yet, despite the Government’s incentives, very few tech start-ups have done really well in India. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, succinctly pointed out at the ‘Startup Mahakumbh’ in April 2025, that Indian start-ups were developing food delivery and online betting apps, while Chinese start-ups were developing machine learning, robotics and next-generation factories. Perhaps, the difference lies in the way Indians are taught to think ~ memorisation of facts, and rote learning are rewarded in examinations, while originality is frowned upon. Our companies seldom launch new products, relying mostly on copying goods being manufactured abroad. No wonder, mediocrity rules the roost; graduates that our universities churn out in abundance are mostly good only for basic repetitive jobs, and can never hope to command even one per cent of Deitke’s asking price. Donald Trump’s US$100,000 premium on H1-B visas is specifically designed to prevent such people from entering the US job market.

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These anomalies would have been good only for table talk, had they not been........

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