Mitesh Khapra Of IIT Madras Honoured In TIME's 100 Influential People In AI
Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at IIT Madras, has been featured in TIME magazine's prestigious 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI). Sharing the spotlight with global leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, he is recognised for his groundbreaking research in natural language processing and machine learning, with a special focus on Indian languages.
Unlike many others on the list who lead AI companies, Khapra's work is primarily academic. He co-founded AI4Bharat, an initiative that develops open-source tools and datasets to make AI accessible in Indian languages.
According to Time Magazine, nearly every Indian startup working on voice technology for the country's many regional languages relies on the datasets of Mitesh Khapra and his team.
While Western models may perform well on highly represented languages like Hindi and Bengali, they are weaker on under-represented languages. To close the gap, Khapra's research lab, AI4Bharat, led a project that took researchers to almost 500 of India's 700 districts, recording thousands of hours of voices from people with diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds to capture all 22 of India's official languages.
His contributions have been central to the government's Bhashini mission, which aims to provide digital services in local languages through AI. Even global tech firms use datasets from AI4Bharat to improve their AI models for languages like Hindi and Marathi.
"Fifteen years ago, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would mostly focus on English-related problems," says Mitesh Khapra. "But now, with the availability of these datasets, I see a shift, Indian students are increasingly working on challenges specific to Indian languages."
The TIME 100 AI list is one of the most respected recognitions in the tech world and includes researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers shaping the future of AI.
Trending News