New Delhi, April 26 The government on Saturday announced it has selected homegrown startup Sarvam AI to build the country’s first artificial intelligence (AI) foundational model.
Out of the 67 proposals, Sarvam AI has been shortlisted to build India’s first indigenous foundational model, said Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw at an event to release the guidelines for the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) scheme here, adding that there will soon be 2-3 more startups that will join the programme.
"We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models," said Vaishnaw.
“The ECMS is a horizontal scheme. It will feed into various sectors, electronic, automotive and so on,” the minister added.
In December 2023, Sarvam AI, founded by Dr Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, raised $41 million in its Series A round led by Lightspeed and supported by Peak XV Partners and Vinod Khosla-run Khosla Ventures.
Dr Raghavan said, “We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country".
"This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders," he added.
Marking a significant step towards bolstering India’s AI ecosystem, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi government in 2024 approved the India AI Mission with the allocation of Rs 10,300 crore. This funding, slated over the next five years, is poised to catalyse various components of the IndiaAI mission.
In a bid to make access to quality datasets easier for developing AI technologies, the government recently took a big step in its India AI Mission by launching AIKosha, the country’s sovereign datasets platform, and an AI Compute Portal.
The government has also set a target of developing GPUs domestically within the next three to five years. This is part of the larger Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission.
The AI Compute Portal will allow companies to access subsidised GPUs for research and development. As of now, about 14,000 GPUs have gone live, with another 4,000 in the pipeline.
Earlier, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had announced the procurement of 18,693 GPUs from selected vendors.
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