Data, Not Models, Will Decide Who Wins the AI Race | Episode 5

What happens when the US government pulls a frontier model out of a country overnight? Aryan Yadav has been building AI-native products for two years, and his blog post on this exact question is what sparked this conversation. In this episode of Samvada, Shubhanga Prasad sits down with Aryan Yadav to unpack why the model layer is becoming commoditized, why open-source is closing in on closed-source faster than most people expect, and why the real defensibility for any organization or nation, lies in its proprietary data, distribution, and trust layer. The conversation moves from the fintech world's obsession with financial data, to why most companies have no system for capturing the conversations where their most important decisions actually get made, to what it would take for India to build genuinely sovereign AI infrastructure - not just India-relevant, but globally competitive. Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 02:17 – The blog post that started it 03:07 – Model is not the moat 05:25 – So what is the moat? 06:42 – What's changed since 2023-24 43:55 – The data no one captures 45:51 – Data as the real moat 46:20 – Why fallbacks matter 48:11 – India's AI ecosystem 49:57 – Do we use Indian models? 53:06 – Closing thoughts 🔔 Subscribe for more conversations like this. Follow @samvāda for updates on future episodes. #Samvada #AI #SovereignAI #DataStrategy #AryanYadav #ShubhangaPrasad #TechPodcast #IndianAI #StartupIndia #ArtificialIntelligence