After Sarvam.ai, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, Gan.ai to now build foundation AI models, says IndiaAI Mission

IndiaAI Mission on Friday announced Soket AI, Gnani.ai, and Gan.ai will be developing foundation artificial intelligence (AI) models apart from Sarvam.ai that was initially selected. ET had reported this more than a month ago.Soket AI will develop an open source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare and education. Gnani.ai will build a 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities.Gan.ai will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting superhuman text-to-speech (TTS) model capabilities.'We are working on another PhD programme and a large talent development programme starting from the very basic to a really advanced level so that the foundational research in AI can also be funded out of the AI mission,' said IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
'I hope some of the smart young engineers working on these teams would like to relocate back to India,' he added. He was referring to the three teams selected to build foundation AI models.
'We're proud 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,' said Ganesh Gopalan, co-founder and chief executive of Gnani.ai.
IndiaAI Mission also said there were now 34,333 GPUs available on the IndiaAI Compute portal. These include GPUs of Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs, 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs. The other GPU variants each comprise less than 1,000 or 500 in number.All seven technically qualified bidders in the second round of the GPU tender are empanelled, it said. However, there was no information on how many of these 34,333 GPUs have been assigned AI workloads and are currently being used.
The seven empanelled bidders are Cyfuture India, Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Netmagic IT Services (NTT GDC India) Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, and Yotta Data Services. In all, 367 datasets have been uploaded on AI Kosh, Vaishnaw revealed. AI Kosh is the government's platform that provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation. It also features AI sandbox capabilities.
IndiaAI Mission said on May 16 it had received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three phases. Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its website.As part of the first phase of approvals, Sarvam.ai was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model.Sarvam's multi-modal, multi-scale model will have 70 billion parameters. It is developing three model variants. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks.Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission.

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