New Delhi: India on Thursday outlined global artificial intelligence or AI plans to build its indigenous foundational model that could take on ChatGPT, Deepseek R1 and others, as it lined up “most affordable” common compute facility powered by nearly 19000 graphics processing units or GPUs to be used by start-ups and researchers. Underscoring the country’s expanding AI vision, the IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also emphasised the country’s access to high-end computing resources and the feasibility of hosting open-source AI models while addressing privacy concerns. The government’s smart move comes at a time when Chinese company DeepSeek has turned heads after its AI model overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple’s app store, challenging the AI dominance concentrated so far with the US firms, particularly Silicon Valley frontrunner Open AI. “India will build a foundational model that is world-class, and that it will be able to compete with the best models across the globe,” Vaishnaw said. On the applications under India AI mission, India is mostly focussing on utilising the power of AI for solving population-scale problems, in areas such as healthcare, education, agri, logistics, weather forecasting and others. “We launched an application proposal and I am happy to say that 18 applications have been selected for the first round of funding. These are in themes of agriculture, learning disability and climate change,” the minister said. India, however, announced the next steps in its AI blueprint, among them, 18,693 GPUs on offer by the empanelled bidders — a list that includes Jio Platforms, CMS Computers, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, Yotta Data Services, and others, and start of AI safety institution, with 8 projects approved under it. The government is also calling for proposals to develop India’s own foundational models that would be aligned to Indian context, Indian languages, culture, basically where datasets are for our country, of our country and for our citizens and biases are removed. The IT minister also assured that the common compute facility, powered by 18,693 GPUs, would be made available at a fraction of global cost benchmarks. The compute facility will be most affordable coming significantly less than one dollar (per GPU hour) after 40 per cent cost borne by the government. Making modern technology accessible to everyone is the economic thinking of our PM. Ours is the most affordable computing facility, at this point of time,” Vaishnaw said. The minister further said that there are at least six major developers/startups who would be able to build foundational models in the next 8-10 months at the outer limit, and 4-6 months at a more optimistic estimate. “Algorithmic efficiency matters a lot, it can deliver a model at much lower cost and less time than the world has seen today,” the minister said, adding that India will have a world class foundational model in the coming few months. The government, under the IndiaAI Mission, had approved Rs 10,372 crore outlay to strengthen India’s AI ecosystem – a key pillar for that was enabling 10,000 GPUs for AI Compute Infrastructure. The 18,693 GPUs would offer large compute power considering that Deepseek was trained on 2,000 GPUs and ChatGPT version 4 on 25,000 GPUs. What is DeepSeek’s privacy policy? As per the policy, the company stores data collected in servers located in China. The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live. We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China. Where we transfer any personal information out of the country where you live, including for one or more of the purposes as set out in this policy, we will do so in accordance with the requirements of applicable data protection laws. How safe is India’s AI Mission?AI safety is in the spotlight across the world, and India AI Mission too emphasises safe and trusted models. However, the government assured that the safety institutions will be collaborative and will act on a hub-and-spoke type model, where multiple institutions can partner to provide and develop tools, frameworks and processes needed for AI safety.What are the approved projects for AI safety in India?The projects approved for AI safety include areas of machine unlearning (IIT Jodhpur), synthetic Data Generation (IIT Roorkee), AI bias mitigation strategy, explainable AI framework (Defence Institute of Advanced Technology Pune), privacy enhancing strategy (IIT Delhi, IIIT Delhi, TEC), AI Ethical certification framework, AI algorithm auditing tool, and AI governance testing framework.
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