BLOOMBERG
21 February 2024
A consortium backed by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and India’s top engineering schools aim to launch its first ChatGPT-style service next month, a big step in the country’s ambitions to become a player in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The BharatGPT group, encompassing an arm of India’s most valuable company and eight affiliated universities, offered a sneak peek of the large language model Tuesday during a technology conference in Mumbai. In a video played before delegates, a motorcycle mechanic in southern India queried an Al bot in his native Tamil, a banker conversed with the tool in Hindi, and a developer in Hyderabad used it to write computer code. If successful, the model — dubbed Hanooman after the half-monkey Hindu deity — will represent an advance for India in the accelerating race to develop potentially transformative AI technology. Bharat GPT envisions the model working via11local languages in four main fields: health care, governance, financial services and education. It developed the model in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology universities includingin Bombay;, backed by wireless carrier Reliance Jio Infocomm and India’s government. A swath of startups such as Sarvam and Krutrim, backed by prominent VC investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partnersand billionaire Vinod Khosla’s fund, are also building open-sourced Al models customised for India. While Silicon Valley companies like Open Al are building everlarger LLMs, those efforts involve workarounds because of computational constraints and simpler models affordable to smaller businesses and government departments. “It’s a different genre of LLMs,” said Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chair of IIT Bombay’s department of computer science and engineering.
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