The Union government has taken a huge step, as it is going to build its own foundational model for artificial intelligence.
It can be modified for use by researchers, companies, academics, and entrepreneurs. This ambitious project is likely to have an initial budget of Rs 2000 crore and be launched after the conclusion of the ongoing parliamentary elections.
Though the US and China are already building functional models, after this step, India will also join them.
The former countries are building these models for improving defence and agriculture, directly or indirectly. As per the Economic Times report, this initiative in India will be led by the IndiaAI Innovation Center, which will be established by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
A senior official said, “The government will likely tap eminent higher education institutes and prominent researchers working on AI in the private sector to work on a foundational model.” He also added that,, due to the wide range of services and applications, the model could be LMM (Large Multimodal Model) or LAM (Large Action Model).
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The official also stated, “The needs and specific demands of India are very different from other companies globally. This (foundational model) will aim to provide output in more than one native language, borrowing from all the work that has been done so far on projects such as Bhashini.” As we all know, Bhasini, the AI based language translation platform, was developed by the IT ministry and launched in 2022.
To train the model, the Indian government is likely to use data, research papers, digitised records of books, and journals from public libraries. Another official said that any other anonymized non-personal data volunteered by researchers, startups, and companies can also be used. In addition, open source tools and datasets, which are available globally, can be used to train the model.
One more official stated, “There are very obvious privacy concerns as well as copyright issues that come with data (used to train foundational models). So historically accurate data from books that are peer-reviewed, scientific research journals can be utilised. We may also look at a platform exclusively for Indian startups where non-personal and anonymized data can be volunteered for training of the model.”
They also said that the government wants all this data to be available so the model can be trained. Thus, ample use cases can be further customized before the model is launched for commercial use.
An official added, “Consider, for example, all the data generated through and during the delivery of government welfare schemes, both at central and state levels. With appropriate and targeted training, the same anonymized data could be repurposed for a better and more targeted delivery of these services and could result in a much faster turnaround time, even for private companies.”
Note: Techchilli couldn’t independently verify the report.
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