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MeitY additional secretary Abhishek Singh exhorted Indian startups and innovators to join the challenge of building an Indian foundational model
Singh said that “foreign” foundational models are trained on western data sets and are not aligned to Indian languages and situations
This comes more than two months after the Centre said that it would undertake the BharatGen project to build a multimodal large language model (LLM)
Additional secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Abhishek Singh has reportedly said that the government is in the process of floating a proposal to build an Indian foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model.
“To ensure that we are able to compete with the world’s best, we are coming up with a call for proposals for building a foundational model in India…,” said Singh, as per The Hindu Business Line.
He also exhorted Indian startups and innovators to join the challenge of building an Indian foundational model, without disclosing a timeline for inviting the proposal. Citing his rationale, the additional secretary said that “foreign” foundational models are trained on western data sets and are not aligned with Indian languages and situations.
He added that there is a need to “invest and provide funding support” for building an Indian foundational model.
This comes more than two months after the Centre said that it would undertake the BharatGen project to build a multimodal large language model (LLM), which would process multiple types of data including text, images, audio, video, among others.
This also comes close on the heels of AI search engine Perplexity founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas saying that Indian companies should build foundational models from scratch, rather than finetuning existing AI models.
Speaking while inaugurating an AI centre of excellence (CoE) at GIFT City in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar, Singh also flagged potential risks associated with AI, including deepfakes and misinformation.
He added that the government is developing tools to build safe, trusted, responsible, ethical AI.
“While AI has a lot of potential, it has a lot of risks. We have seen how deepfakes, misinformation works and how wrong responses from AI can cause problems. For this, we are building tools for building safe, trusted, responsible, ethical AI. Researchers and institutions are building tools for detecting algorithmic biases, misinformation in AI, detecting deepfakes. These tools will also be available to CoEs and all startups building it,” Singh reportedly added.
Noting that India is involved “globally in the development of AI governance guidelines”, the senior government official added that the country is looking to set up 18,000 Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) under the IndiaAI Mission to build a scalable AI computing ecosystem to aid startups, researchers, students and academicians.
The comments come at a time when Indian authorities are leaving no stone unturned on the regulatory front to capitalise on the AI boom. Last week, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the country is ready to establish itself as a global leader in AI space. He emphasised on the need for balanced regulations to balance AI risks with fostering innovation.
The growing push for AI has led to the emergence of a slew of new homegrown AI startups, building use cases for companies both domestically and globally. As per Inc42 data, India is home to more than 200 GenAI startups that have raised more than $1.2 Bn in funding between 2020 and 2024.
Overall, the homegrown AI ecosystem is projected to become a $17 Bn market opportunity by 2030.
