In a significant step towards India’s ambitions to become a player in the field of artificial intelligence, a consortium backed by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd and India’s top engineering schools aim to launch its first ChatGPT-style service next month.
The model is being developed in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology universities and is backed by Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.
It will represent an advance for India in the accelerating race to develop potentially transformative AI technology. BharatGPT envisions the model working via 11 local languages in four main fields: health care, governance, financial services and education.
It developed the model in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology universities including in Bombay, backed by wireless carrier Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd and the Indian government.
Other startups such as Sarvam and Krutrim backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vinod Khosla’s fund, are also building open-sourced AI models for India.
“It’s a different genre of LLMs,” said Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chair of IIT Bombay’s department of computer science and engineering.
The AI model – Hanooman – will offer speech-to-text capabilities to the users with the goal to make it more user-friendly.
Reliance Jio will build customised models for specific uses as well. Reliance is already working on Jio Brain- a platform to use AI across a network of about 450 million subscribers.
LLMs are systems that learn from vast quantities of data and generate natural-sounding responses. Such models harness generative AI, a newer type of artificial intelligence popularised by the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.