India Selects 3 AI Teams for Foundation Models

New Delhi, May 30 (PTI) After Sarvam AI, India on Friday selected three more teams -- Soket AI, Gan AI, Gnani AI -- for building indigenous artificial intelligence foundation models.

In line with its global AI ambitions -- a comprehensive plan that entails enhanced AI infrastructure and local language model development -- India has also announced availability of 16,000 more GPUs that would take the compute facility available to startups and researchers here to 34,000.

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said significant progress has been made on India AI Mission, with focus on democratisation of technology.

The compute facility supercharged with 34,000 GPUs will enable India to develop AI ecosystem in a big way, he said.

Three more teams -- Soket AI, Gan AI, Gnani AI -- have been selected for building indigenous artificial intelligence foundation models.

"I would like to make some mentions about the three teams that have been selected today. Like Sarvam, these three teams also have a very big target ahead of them. Whichever sector they focus on, they must be among the top five in the world," Vaishnaw said.

Put simply, foundation models in generative AI are large, pre-trained models that form the base for a variety of AI applications.

In April this year, Sarvam AI was selected to build India's first indigenous AI foundational model, marking a milestone in the country's AI innovation ecosystem.

Soket AI will develop open source 120 billion parametres foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare, and education.

Gan AI will create 70 billion parameters of multilingual foundation model targeting capabilities to surpass the current global leader.

Gnani AI will build a 14 billion parameter Voice AI foundation model delivering multilingal real-time speech processing with advances reasoning capabilities.

Ganesh Gopalan, Co-Founder and CEO of Gnani.ai, said in a statement, "We are honoured to be selected under the IndiaAI Mission to develop large language models that truly represent India's linguistic diversity. At Gnani.ai, our mission has always been to make technology more inclusive and accessible".

Gopalan further said Gnani.ai is keen to "lead the way in developing voice-to-voice large language models for India and the world, because we believe transformative AI must speak the language of the people it serves".