India will have its own AI chipsets in 3-4 years: IT minister Vaishnaw

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) today unveiled a slew of initiatives that will boost the development of indigenous AI. India will soon manufacture its own GPU, minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, while speaking at an event organised by his ministry on the completion of one year of the launch of the Rs 10,372 crore AI Mission.

“We have formalised the work for taking a big leap in having our own chipsets (GPU). This will change the course of our country. As we finalise the entire program, we are right now in an extensive consultation stage, once that's done, then in the coming 3-4 years we will have a seat at the table among the top five countries,” Vaishnaw said. 

Speaking about the applications the ministry received for development of LLMs, Vaishnaw said, “Of 67 applications, the MeitY will pick up three or five applications which are more mature and start from there.” The minister didn’t share any names of these shortlisted applicants.

He said that Indian AI models can learn from the ingenuity of existing foundational models. “Our foundational model will basically get the strength from the latest mathematical algorithms, because math is going to really make that big difference, that quantum jump in efficiency, and they will also use the best practices in engineering the model so that the resources can be put to the best use.”

India will have a foundational model at a fraction of the cost, in the same way it sent a mission to the moon at a fraction of the cost incurred by developed countries, he said. 

The IT ministry also announced a set of key initiatives under the AI mission which has been in the works for several months. This included a unified datasets platform, AI KOSHA, an AI compute portal to offer GPU as a service and an AI competency framework cum portal, iGOT AI, for the training of civil servants at all levels of the government.

“We are now making available about 15,000 GPUs of capacity, but this will keep getting added to both (initiatives) through additional commitments from various private sector providers and also possibly government's own managed service provision of GPUs,” secretary S Krishnan said.

The GPU as a service is a facility which is now accessible to researchers and startups at a cost which is significantly lower than what is being achieved anywhere else in the world, Krishnan said.

A significant part of the AI compute capacity offered through the portal will be made available for training of indigenous models, Vaishnaw said.

AI KOSHA would provide researchers and startups with data, tools and AI models needed for developing indigenous reasoning models and applications.   

Referring to the importance of a national unified datasets platform, Krishan said that it will help in mitigating the biases that come with foreign AI models.

“So through the AI KOSHA…we want to ensure that this shortcoming is eliminated and these data sets are available for various model builders and others to work on, and to make sure that we are able to launch many more India specific models,” Krishnan said.

Abishek Singh, additional secretary, MeitY and CEO of India AI Mission, urged the central and state government agencies to partner with AI KOSHA and contribute datasets to the platform. Singh also urged the government agencies to come up with problem statements which can be used by startups for development of AI applications.