Google, MeitY Startup Hub To Upskill 10K Startups In AI

Tech giant Google on Wednesday (July 17) announced that it is working with the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s (MeitY) Startup Hub to upskill 10,000 homegrown startups in artificial intelligence.

“Today, more than 1.5 million developers globally use Gemini models across its tools. The fastest way to build with Gemini is through its developer platform Google AI Studio, and India has one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio today,” the company said in a statement.

“Google is democratising AI for Indian developers by focusing on three key areas with transformative potential in India: multimodal, multilingual, and mobile,” it added. 

At the Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event, the company said that it will empower Indian developers and startups through Google Cloud credits, AI-first programming curriculum, and launch of a nationwide GenAI Hackathon and AI Startup Bootcamp. 

Further, Google has also rolled out its open source AI model Gemma 2 to India developers. Initially launched in the US in May, Gemma 2 is higher-performing and more efficient at inference than its predecessors and available in both 9 Bn and 27Bn parameter sizes.

Additionally, Google is also making a 2 Mn token context window available on its AI models Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2. To be sure, tthe amount of data (words, images, videos, audio or code) a model can process at once depends on the size of context window.

Apart from that, the Google Deepmind India team has also introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess language generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for various Indian languages.

The tech giant has also open-sourced its Composition of Language Models (CALM) framework, designed to help developers combine specialized language models with Gemma models.

Moreover, the company is also rolling out Google Wallet APIs, simplifying the integration of loyalty programs, tickets and gift cards. Google will implement a new pricing mechanism for Indian developers using Google Maps with up to 70% lower costs on most APIs.

Google said it will also give developers building for ONDC a concession of up to 90% on select Google Maps Platform APIs.

The development comes days after Google launched its AI-focused accelerator programme AI First in India in June. As part of the three-month programme, Google will provide equity-free support to Seed to Series A startups using AI in their key products.

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