AI Mission should focus on building core technology

Avoid repeating mistakes made in semiconductor and mobile manufacturing, say experts

- Shouvik Das

The Centre's India AI Mission, which seeks to bring India up to speed with the US, China and the rest of the world in artificial intelligence (AI), could be pivotal for India to avoid repeating the mistakes it made with semiconductor and mobile phone manufacturing, industry veterans told Mint.

On Saturday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a fiscal outlay of ₹2,000 crore ($230 million) for the Mission. The move succeeded the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) announcing last Thursday that a repository of 18,693 graphic processing units (GPUs), provided by private sector companies, was ready to be used as an on-cloud supercomputing service to help train AI models. Startups and academia members will get access to the computing platform after being vetted by Meity-appointed officials on merit.

A senior government official said, requesting anonymity, that the platform that enables access to GPUs to startups is ready, and the framework to decide who gets access to the central compute infrastructure under the AI Mission "will be decided soon."