Infosys' Narayana Murthy calls out artificial intelligence hype in India: ‘Silly, old programmes’
Narayana Murthy criticised the hype around artificial intelligence in India, labeling many current programmes as outdated.
Infosys founder and India’s tech mogul Narayana Murthy on Tuesday warned against the rising artificial intelligence trend in India, calling most of it “silly old programmes”.
Speaking at TiE Con Mumbai 2025, Narayana Murthy said he is seeing a lot of “ordinary” programmes being touted as artificial intelligence since it has become a “fashion” to bring up AI in almost everything in India.
“I think somehow it has become a fashion in India to talk of AI for everything. I have seen several normal ordinary programs touted as AI,” he was quoted as saying in a Moneycontrol report.
Murthy explains fundamental principles of AI
Murthy also explained the basic fundamental principles of artificial intelligence - machine learning and deep learning - and their applications.
Machine learning, he said, is a “large-scale correlation” and, therefore, helps to predict using a large amount of data, and deep learning imitates the working of the human brain.
While machine learning depends on a lot of data and thus, it majorly handles supervised algorithms, deep learning can solve and handle “unsupervised algorithms” because it uses the data to create new branches of programs or new conditions, Murthy explained, said the Moneycontrol report.
“So unsupervised data, which uses deep learning and neural networks, has much greater potential to do things that mimic human behaviour better,” Murthy said.
“But what I am seeing being called AI is silly, old programs,” he added.
Touching upon the issue of whether AI will replace jobs, Murthy said that every technological advancement can lead to elimination of some jobs, however, it can also create new opportunities if implemented wisely.
“In each tech, certain jobs will be eliminated, but if used in an assisted manner, we can grow the economy,” a Business Standard report quoted him as saying.
“AI for example, if you use it in autonomous vehicles for transport, hospital care, it will lead to expansion of those companies and create jobs,” he added.
