AI crucial to growing India's overall ecosystem, says BharatGen's Rishi Bal

New Delhi [India], September 18 (ANI): Artificial Intelligence (AI) is essential for accelerating India overall ecosystem, said Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President of BharatGen.

Speaking to ANI, Bal outlined BharatGen vision to build a sovereign and accessible AI ecosystem in India that reflects the country linguistic and cultural diversity.

BharatGen is a pioneering initiative by the BharatGen Consortium, envisioned as a comprehensive suite of Generative AI technologies designed to serve India diverse socio-cultural, linguistic, and industrial needs. Anchored under the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH), IIT Bombay, and supported by the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), Department of Science and Technology (DST), BharatGen is the nation first government-funded Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) project.

The initiative is developing inclusive and efficient AI across 22 Indian languages, integrating text, speech, and images to create robust AI solutions built for India realities.

Sovereignty to ensure that there is supply security and safety in AI that is being built and deployed in India. The second is Indianness, so that we can bring language, culture, and an Indian perspective to the models that we are building and actually embed in them. And the third is having accessibility, so ensuring that all people have access to this AI, regardless of the language dialect that they speak in or the particular area of interest that they have, Bal said.

Speaking about BharatGen progress in AI model development, Bal noted that the company has already released a range of smaller models and is now scaling up with support from the government AI Mission program.

AI works. So the AI Missions Program unlocks for us a completely new set of models that we can develop. We have already built a range of small models with fewer than 10 billion parameters, which are available to the public today. But what AI missions funding does is it allows us to build a significantly larger and more capable set of models, he explained.

He added that these upcoming models will be multimodal in nature. They will be able to handle text, they will be able to handle images, they will also handle speech, all at the same time, and they will also have more intelligence built into them.

One standout application of BharatGen AI technology is in agriculture. Bal shared the development of Krishi Saathi, a voice-enabled WhatsApp-based tool aimed at helping farmers access real-time, localised solutions to farming issues.

A great example of the domain-specific work that were doing is an application we built for farmers called Krishi Saathi... We embedded our intelligence into a WhatsApp phone number, so anybody can pick up a phone, go to WhatsApp and ask a question. And what we did is we made it voice enabled, so you can ask it questions in Hindi about the range of problems that you are having, and the application actually asks you questions back right there in WhatsApp, all through voice chat, so you dont need to type anything, Bal said.

He elaborated that the tool doesnt stop at providing suggestions. It goes further to assist farmers in procuring necessary inputs and accessing subsidies. We actually show them where nearby they can go and get it, and if there is some subsidy available for it, we actually show them what form they can fill... You can just take a picture of your Aadhaar card, and it will actually fill up some of the form for you as well.

On being selected for government funding under India AI mission, Bal expressed gratitude. We are very grateful to the leadership at the India mission and the Ministry of Information and Technology for this visionary program that accelerates the growth of AI in India, he said, acknowledging the support from the Department of Science and Technology and other academic collaborators.

The funding, Bal said, is critical to overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks in high-computation AI development. It is very computationally intensive... this fund allows us to get access to a significantly larger number of chips that we need to build this AI, he said.

With this support, BharatGen plans to develop sector-specific AI models for areas such as law, agriculture, finance, and governance. Bal stressed the ecosystem-wide benefits of this initiative: These models that we are able to develop with this new round of funding will be embedded inside of different types of applications that citizens will use... The other thing that very interesting about this round of funding... is that a lot of students from these academic institutes are also working with us... they are getting trained as well.

Bal concluded by underscoring the long-term goal of building not just AI infrastructure, but also nurturing a generation of skilled AI talent within India. So not only are we creating the next generation of models, but we are also creating the next generation of homegrown talent who will build the next wave of India AI right here in India, he said. (ANI)

Disclaimer: This news article is a direct feed from ANI and has not been edited by the News Nation team. The news agency is solely responsible for its content.