IndiaAI Mission backs 20 indigenous AI model proposals

The government has identified 20 indigenous sovereign AI model proposals for support under the IndiaAI Mission, comprising 12 large language models (LLMs) and eight small language models (SLMs), Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw informed Parliament.

“The Government of India is supporting Indian startups and institutions to develop large language models. Twenty indigenous sovereign model proposals have been identified for support, comprising 12 LLMs and eight SLMs,” the minister said.

The IndiaAI Mission aims to create economic opportunities and employment for India’s youth while addressing the risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI). Among the projects under development are Sarvam AI’s 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models, Gnani.ai’s speech-to-speech model, BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models and Avataar AI’s video generation model.

Several specialised AI models for healthcare, language technologies and agentic AI are also being developed as part of the initiative.

Shedding light on India’s AI strategy, Vaishnaw said it builds on the country’s $300 billion IT sector, which employs nearly six million people. The IndiaAI Mission comprises seven pillars, including AI model development, applications, datasets, talent development and affordable compute infrastructure.

To strengthen India’s AI ecosystem, the mission has empanelled 15 compute service providers, approved 237 projects and allocated 9.3 million graphics processing unit (GPU) hours. Compute resources are available nationwide, enabling startups, researchers and institutions to access AI infrastructure irrespective of their location.

On the applications front, the mission has launched 12 national AI hackathons and innovation challenges, supported the development of 62 AI prototypes and facilitated the deployment of 20 AI-based solutions, said Vaishnaw. VarIndia