Govt Opens Second Round Of Bids For India AI Mission

The government has reportedly opened a second round of bids for its India AI Mission, focusing on areas like watermarking and labelling, ethical AI and risk assessment.

The IndiaAI Mission aims to create an AI ecosystem, offering supercomputing capabilities comprising over 10,000 GPUs to various stakeholders.

As per ET, the deadline to apply for the bids is January 9.

These bids are part of the INR 10,372 Cr India AI Mission, an initiative launched by the IT Ministry in July last year. The mission aims to establish a compute capacity of up to 10,000 graphic processing units (GPUs), develop AI applications for critical sectors, and tackle challenges identified by central and state governments and government-run institutions.

Out of the total INR 10,371 Cr allocated for the India AI Mission, approximately INR 200 Cr has been reserved for the IndiaAI datasets platform, while INR 689 Cr has been earmarked for the IndiaAI application development initiative, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Jitin Prasada, informed the Rajya Sabha on Friday.

Earlier in the day, the government informed the Rajya Sabha about its plans to allocate INR 4,563 Cr towards building a compute capacity of 10,000 or more graphics processing units (GPUs) under the India AI Mission. Additionally, INR 1,971 Cr has been earmarked for setting up the new IndiaAI Innovation Centre.

In the previous round, the government invited bids from Indian academic institutions, R&D organisations, companies, and startups engaged in areas such as machine unlearning, synthetic data generation, AI bias mitigation, privacy-enhancing tools, explainable AI, AI governance testing, ethical AI certification, and algorithm auditing tools.

The IndiaAI Mission comprises the following pillars:

• IndiaAI Compute Capacity: It envisions building a cutting-edge, scalable AI computing infrastructure by deploying more than 10,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) through PPP model
• IndiaAI Innovation Centre (IAIC): With this, the Centre is looking to create a leading academic institution to retain top research talent, develop and deploy indigenous large multimodal models (LMMs) and domain-specific models
• IndiaAI Datasets Platform: This platform will be developed by IndiaAI’s independent business division (IBD) and will look to enhance accessibility, quality, and utility of public sector datasets
• IndiaAI FutureSkills: This program will focus on expanding the accessibility of graduate and post-graduate AI programs as well establishing AI Labs to impart foundational-level courses in the domain.