Centre Invites Startups To Share Anonymous Data For AIKosha: Report

In an effort to push AI advancement in India, the Centre is reportedly inviting private entities, including startups to share anonymous, non-personal datasets of their users to the AIKosha platform.

An ET report, citing a government official, said that the move aims at scaling up AI apps in the country, besides enabling access to enough data for training large language models (LLMs).

It further said that companies such as Google, Uber and PhonePe can share anonymised datasets of usage patterns on their websites without disclosing the identity or any other personal details of their users. 

“Several companies had reached out to the government with interest in contributing to AIKosha, so the department decided to release a standard expression of interest (EoI) so that instead of these one-on-one dealings we can give the opportunity to everyone to contribute,” another official was quoted as saying in the report.

Why Availability Of Data Is Important?: Data availability, especially current and India-specific, is necessary to train accurate local AI models on top of which applications can be developed.

So far, private labels such as Sarvam AI, Ola Krutrim and Eka Care have shared their non-personal datasets to the platform.

The Centre also has datasets from several arms of the government and hosts census data, weather data from the meteorological department, besides datasets from agencies such as the ministries of agriculture and mines, and the state of Telangana.

AIKosha & Govt’s AI Push: This comes only a day after Digital India Bhashini Division’s chief executive Amitabh Nag was given an additional charge as the director of AIKosha (India AI Datasets Platform) and IndiaAI Applications Development initiative.

The portal was launched a few weeks ago, under the IndiaAI Mission, that offers a repository of 300 datasets, 80 AI models and other tools, with a primary goal of fostering AI innovation in India.

AIKosha features AI sandbox capabilities via integrated development environment along with tools and tutorials, while also equipped with features such as content discoverability, scoring of datasets, permission based access and security mechanisms, secure APIs and firewalls.

This also comes at a time when the Centre is giving a huge push to the development of AI models in the country through its IndiaAI mission.

In January, union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India is planning to build its own domestic large language model (LLM) as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission.

As per Inc42, the homegrown GenAI market is expected to see a major boom in the coming years and will likely cross the $17 Bn mark by 2030.