Govt eyes domestic AI models

The government on Thursday announced plans to support homegrown large language models (LLMs) developed by Indian startups and companies, days after a Chinese company's demonstration of cost-efficient AI capabilities led to a trillion-dollar market value drop for American tech giants.

- Aditi Agrawal

NEW DELHI:

Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that six Indian startups are positioned to release their foundation models in the next ten months.

"What the world has seen today is that algorithmic efficiency matters a lot. Algorithmic efficiency can deliver a model at a much lower cost and in a much lesser time than the world has seen. Many of our researchers have been working on similar concepts. We are confident that using those concepts, we will be able to have a world-class foundational model in the next few months," Vaishnaw said.

Foundation models, which form the basis of AI systems such as ChatGPT, are large artificial intelligence systems trained on vast amounts of data to develop broad capabilities in language understanding and generation. Unlike traditional AI programs designed for specific tasks, these models learn general patterns and knowledge that can be adapted for various applications—from writing code to analysing scientific papers. They serve as a base layer of artificial intelligence that can be refined for specific uses.

The development comes after DeepSeek, a subsidiary of Chinese algorithmic trading company High-Flyer, demonstrated its AI model built at a reported cost of $6 million, significantly lower than the $100 million spent by American companies like OpenAI on comparable models such as GPT4.