In order to compete with foreign AI foundational models that form the base of many applications like ChatGPT and Gemini, India is calling for proposals for building its own foundational model, said Abhishek Singh, additional secretary, Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) during his visit to GIFT City in Gujarat, Monday.
“One key issue has been, how does India build a foundational model? Currently, all the foundational models which we are using --- whether it is ChatGPT or Llama 3 or Gemini or Claude -- are foreign. Now China has also come up with Deepseek and other models. We need to invest and provide funding support to build an Indian foundational model. The foreign foundational models are trained on western data sets and are not aligned to Indian languages and Indian situations, and sometimes give wrong or inappropriate responses,” said Singh while speaking at the inauguration of an AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) at GIFT City at Gandhinagar where Chief minister Bhupendra Patel was also present.
“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. I am sure some of the start-ups and innovators present here today will be joining this challenge to build an Indian foundational model ,” Singh added without disclosing a timeframe for the proposals. Foundational models are a type of artificial intelligence model, capable of performing a wide range of tasks. These models are created by training on vast and diverse datasets, enabling their use across various applications.
A lot of risks
“While AI has a lot of potential, it has a lot of risks. We have seen how deep fakes, 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 deep fakes. These tools will also be available to CoEs and all start-ups building it,” the official added.
Pointing out that India was involved “globally in the development of AI governance guidelines,” Singh said Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be travelling to Paris on February 10-11 where both India and France will be co-hosting the AI Action Summit. The official also said that India is looking to set up 18000 Graphic Processing Units or GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission to build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem to support start-ups, researchers, students and academicians.
“India has very few GPUs compared to other countries. So under the AI Mission we have floated tenders and in partnership with the industry and our objective was to set up 10000 GPUs. We opened the financial bids last week and we are hoping for 18,000 GPUs at very competitive rates. And these GPUs will be available to all start-ups and researchers at a further subsidised cost. The start-ups working in the CoE will also benefit from this,” he added.