The four startups leading the race to build India's first LLM

With the government's support, work begins on foundational models for AI services

- AASHISH ARYAN & AVIK DAS

India will be ready with its first indigenously developed artificial intelligence large language model (LLM) in six to eight months, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, on January 30 this year.

The move was seen as India's response to DeepSeek, an open-source LLM developed in China, reportedly at a fraction of the cost it took to create other models globally. (LLMs are AI programmes trained on vast amounts of text data to understand, generate, and process human language.)

But Indian government officials say they are not merely reacting to events elsewhere. A plan to develop indigenous LLMs was already in the works, evident from the government accepting bids for more than 18,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) when the initial demand projection was just 10,000.

"We have continued accepting bids from companies to procure and supply GPUs. If not for LLMs, where else could all these GPUs possibly be used?" a senior government official told Business Standard.