India AI Mission, Gates Foundation to sign MoU soon: Vaishnaw

India AI mission and Gates Foundation will soon sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for developing AI solutions for better crops, stronger healthcare, smarter education, and climate resilience, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Wednesday.

The minister made these announcements on social media platform X after a meeting with Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.

"AI solutions for better crops, stronger healthcare, smarter education & climate resilience— MoU soon between India AI Mission & Gates Foundation," Vaishnaw wrote on X.

On Tuesday, the minister had shared that IndiaAI Mission has signed an agreement with Parliament to leverage the latter's data for the development of an indigenous artificial intelligence technology.

He had said it is important to develop our own LLM (large language model like ChatGPT) as open source technology available at present may not remain open in future like OpenAI.

The government is also focusing on the development of indigenous GPU (graphics processing unit) chips which is very important to build compute infrastructure to support AI development.

Earlier today, the IndiaAI Mission announced that it has received around 67 proposals as of February 15 for developing indigenous AI models. 

According to a PIB release, out of total proposals, 22 are focused on foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs)and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and 45 on domain-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) targeting sectors like healthcare, education, and finance. 

The proposals were submitted in response to a Call for Proposals issued in January by the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (IAIC), which invited startups and researchers to develop AI models trained on Indian datasets.

(With inputs from YourStory Media)