Indigenous SLM, LLMs to take AI summit centre stage

With less than a week to go for the five-day AI Impact Summit, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is gearing up to showcase the latest developments in the field of indigenous development of large and small language models (SLM), tools and services built by various startups, government organisations, and states using AI, a senior government official has said.

- AASHISH ARYAN & SHIVANI SHINDE

According to sources, the government is likely to formally launch India’s first indigenously developed large language model (LLM) by Sarvarm during the summit, along with other LLMs and SLMs from other companies and startups.

The IT ministry has also asked all participating companies to conduct extensive dry runs of their products and AI enabled services, another official said.

“There could be some large announcements in terms of funding for AI data centres or on the onboarding of more GPUs (graphics processing units), up nearly two-three times from the current number of nearly 40,000,” one of the officials quoted above said.

The government has so far approved 12 players to build indigenous LLMs and SLMs in India, including an open-source 120-billion-parameter model being developed by Sarvam.

A second open-source suite of multilingual and multimodal models, being developed by a BharatGen team led by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, will launch its flagship Param2, a 17B-parameter sovereign multilingual foundation model, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

Built fully in India using a mixture-of-experts architecture, the model supports 22 Indian languages and is trained on large India-centric datasets under Bharat Data Sagar.