Centre To Support, Fund Indian AI Startups: MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Minister of State (MoS) for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Saturday (December 16) said that the Centre plans to fund and support artificial intelligence (AI) startups in the country. 

Modelled on the lines of a similar framework for the semiconductor industry, Chandrasekhar said that funding and incentives will be rolled out to scale the burgeoning ecosystem. 

“AI compute (part of India AI Mission) will have two segments – one led by the private sector, similar to the design of the semiconductor ecosystem with incentivised investments. The other segment involves indigenously developed public sector capacity for AI emerging from C-DAC, which will be available to the Indian ecosystem,” Chandrasekhar said while speaking at an event in Bengaluru.

The government will also deploy ‘financial resources’ to build foundational AI models, large language models (LLMs), and various use cases for the emerging technology. He also said that the Centre would explore synergies between AI and semiconductor industries in areas such as development of AI chips. 

The minister said that the Centre is focussed on building a close knit ecosystem of academia, industry and startups to push the AI space in India. Chandrasekhar also called for nurturing AI talent in the country to fuel the demand from the booming AI space.

Meanwhile, he also called for formulating a global framework to regulate AI, saying that the emerging technology, over the course of next six to nine months, may take shape in a way that the world ‘may not anticipate or fully understand’.

“We need a global framework urgently because, in the next six to nine months, AI will take shape and evolve in a way that we may not anticipate or fully understand… Therefore, we need to establish this framework quickly, with a granular set of principles and rules that all countries can follow,” added Chandrasekhar.

He also termed AI as a ‘significant bolt’ to the ‘already galloping’ Indian digital economy. The MoS said that AI can propel India’s digital economy and foster growth in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, and governance. 

On the rising menace of GenAI-powered deepfakes, misinformation, and disinformation, the minister reiterated that the Centre has proactively taken steps to address challenges on the digital front.

“Deepfakes are a classic example because misinformation and patently false information are diseases that social media has spread, causing harm, especially in democratic countries. It creates divisions, incitements, and fake narratives. Misinformation has been a problem in social media; now imagine misinformation powered by AI,” the minister added.

The move to fund homegrown AI startups comes at a time when generative AI has become a buzzword among Indian entrepreneurs. From Google’s Bard to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the GenAI space has caught the imagination of people across the globe in the recent past. The adoption of the emerging technology is further expected to soar as businesses and consumers deploy and use applications such as text, image, audio and video, among others. 

This has spawned a host of new Indian startups in the domains. As per Inc42 data, India is home to more than 70 GenAI startups that have raised capital in excess of $440 Mn between 2019 and Q3 2023. 

Inc42 also estimates the homegrown GenAI market to grow to a market size of $17 Bn by 2030 from $1.1 Bn in 2023.