After Sarvam.ai, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, Gan.ai to now build foundation AI models, says IndiaAI Mission
The
IndiaAI Mission
on Friday announced
Soket AI
,
Gnani.ai
, and
Gan.ai
will be developing foundation artificial intelligence (AI) models apart from
Sarvam.ai
, which was initially selected.
ET had reported
this more than a month ago.
Soket AI will develop an open source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targetting sectors such as defence, healthcare and education. Gnani.ai will build a 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities.
Gan.ai will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting superhuman text-to-speech (TTS) model capabilities.
The IndiaAI Mission also said that 34,333 GPUs are now available on the IndiaAI Compute portal. These include GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs, 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs. The other GPU variants each comprise fewer than 1,000 or 500 in number.
All
seven technically qualified bidders
in the second round of the GPU tender are empanelled, it said.
Live Events
The seven empanelled bidders are Cyfuture India, Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Netmagic IT Services (NTT GDC India), Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, and Yotta Data Services.
Discover the stories of your interest
Blockchain
5 Stories
Cyber-safety
7 Stories
Fintech
9 Stories
E-comm
9 Stories
ML
8 Stories
Edtech
6 Stories
367 datasets have been uploaded on AI Kosh, Vaishnaw revealed. AI Kosh is the government's platform that provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation. It also features AI sandbox capabilities.
IndiaAI Mission on May 16 had said that it has received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three phases.
Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.
'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its website.
As part of the first phase of approvals, Sarvam.ai was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model.
Sarvam's multimodal, multi-scale model will have 70 billion parameters.
Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan had said on April 26 that the model will be completed in six months.
Capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, Sarvam's model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, the startup had said in a statement.
According to cofounder Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is developing three model variants -- Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks.
Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model, people in the know had said.
'We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models,' Kumar had said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Time of India
Under fire, Sarvam AI co-founder says worries about Indic GenAI model premature
Chennai/Bengaluru: India's latest home-grown generative AI language model, Sarvam-M, has drawn fire from sections of the developer community for what they describe as "under-whelming" performance. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now But Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam AI, insists the scepticism is premature and betrays a misunderstanding of how AI frontier models mature. "The ecosystem is early and people are worried too early," he tells TOI. "We are scrambling amongst ourselves when the world moves fast. We want to create an AI ecosystem where more people can positively collaborate." Released this month, the relatively small 24-billion-parameter Sarvam-M model was trained to reason across ten Indian languages while tackling maths and coding tasks. Kumar says benchmarks on Hugging Face (a platform and open-source library primarily used for leveraging machine learning models) show the model matching or outscoring popular open-source rivals (like Meta's Llama, Mistral Small and Gemma 3) in mathematics, programming and Indic-language comprehension. "With this we want to show that we cracked post-training (process of refining and optimising a machine learning model after its initial training phase) problems and our methodology is comparable with other models," he explains. "We open-sourced this because we want to show that such a model can be built and encourage other people to do it." Much of the social-media push-back has centred on relatively modest early-stage download numbers and the perception that Sarvam-M offers few breakthrough capabilities. Kumar counters that India's sovereign-AI ambitions demand more than one blockbuster release. "These things involve both scientific explorations and resource consumption," he says. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "I think we are on the path to building state-of-the-art models. " Sarvam AI is the first startup chosen to build a frontier model under the government's IndiaAI Mission, which is funding compute, data and research partnerships to reduce reliance on overseas platforms. Although the latest model is a private effort separate from the IndiaAI Mission, Kumar says the initiative will benefit everyone. He declines to give a timeline for the AI Mission-backed foundation model, noting that the company has yet to receive graphics-processing units (GPUs) from government suppliers. "We will open-source the foundational model," he says, but warns that schedules depend on hardware access and collaborative research cycles. Industry weighs in Seasoned AI practitioners say early criticism overlooks the scale of what Sarvam is attempting. "Building a 24-billion-parameter model in India is not easy, especially when deep research isn't encouraged in most universities or companies," says Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder of consultancy AI&Beyond. "Sarvam-M demonstrates robust multilingual reasoning by supporting ten Indian languages – no other model in the world has such a strong Indic component. " Sourabh Deorah, CEO & co-founder of an AI-powered employee engagement and rewards platform, says that as someone deeply involved in machine learning, he understands how challenging it is to create a 24-bn parameter model that not only handles reasoning tasks like math and programming but also delivers high-quality performance across multiple Indian languages – many of which have long been underserved in the AI space. Piyush Goel, CEO & founder of IT consulting company Beyond Key, says that the new model's potential to drive agentic AI in education, healthcare, and automation is exciting. Agentic AI is a type of AI that makes decisions and takes actions based on context and objectives without constant human intervention. Karthikeyan G, senior director of engineering architecture at software company Ascendion, says Sarvam-M's architecture will enable AI agents to interact among themselves (to take complex decisions) thanks to the standardised protocols being used. This will be crucial for the next stage of the AI wave.
India.com
19 hours ago
- India.com
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella finally breaks silence on sacking 6000 employees, says they were not fired....
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella- File image Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on recent layoffs: In a massive statement after Microsoft laid off 6,000 jobs, CEO Satya Nadella has clarified that the recent layoffs were not linked to employee performance, but the actual reason behind the layoffs was organizational restructuring. Here are all the details you need to know about the recent statement of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. CEO Satya Nadella stated that the layoffs were done with a clear focus on accelerating the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI)-first strategy. The CEO emphasized that Microsoft's vision is now centered on AI transformation. Reports have it that Microsoft's plan includes reallocating resources and talent to areas aligned with emerging business priorities. Microsoft aims to boost AI innovation in India In another significant development for Microsoft, Microsoft and Yotta Data Services, India's leading sovereign cloud infrastructure and platform services provider recently partnered to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in India. The partnership enables Microsoft and Yotta to engage with IndiaAI Mission participants, government agencies, IITs, startups, enterprises, and software development companies to leapfrog AI innovation, a report by IANS news agency said. Microsoft said it would bring its AzureAI services to Shakti Cloud, Yotta's AI cloud platform, to offer cutting-edge AI capabilities to developers, startups, enterprises, and public sector organisations across India. 'Our partnership with Yotta to power Shakti Cloud will help unlock AI innovation at scale. Microsoft is honoured to play its part in helping the country realise its AI ambitions through innovation that reflect India's unique needs and priorities,' said Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia. In January this year, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced a collaboration with IndiaAI, a division of Digital India Corporation, to advance AI and emerging technologies in the country, and established AI Centre of Excellence and AI Productivity Labs to foster inclusive growth. (With inputs from agencies)
Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
AI datasets by IIT-Bombay to simplify Indian texts, help in AI research
AI datasets by IIT-Bombay to simplify Indian texts, help in AI research (ANI) MUMBAI: For years, research in Indian knowledge systems, often available in Indian languages such as Sanskrit, was challenging for researchers. However, a data curation exercise carried out by the premier IIT-Bombay, as part of its contribution to the central govt's AIKosh portal, has simplified it to some extent by digitising 30 different textbooks. A dataset containing around 2.18 lakh sentences with 1.5 million words from these textbooks, covering diverse topics such as astronomy, medicine, and mathematics, with some even as old as 18 centuries, is now available on the govt portal. AIKosh, launched in March, is a source for datasets, models, toolkits, and more from diverse sources that aim to help AI-based innovation and research. IIT-Bombay, one of the leading contributors to the AIKosh platform, along with BharatGen, a consortium of seven institutes again led by IIT-Bombay, has contributed 37 diverse models and datasets on the portal so far. IIT-Bombay alone launched around 16 culturally significant datasets on the platform to contribute to the country's AI mission. BharatGen, funded through a section 8 company formed by the Department of Science and Technology with IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Madras, IIT-Hyderabad, IIT-Mandi, IIM-Indore, and IIIT-Hyderabad as partners, launched 21 models on the portal. 'We are not only researching Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative models for AI that are effective and data and compute efficient, but also building sovereign models for India from the ground up. We are creating datasets for training these models and fine-tuning them for downstream tasks such as conversation and question-answering, while creating benchmarking datasets towards calibrating the performance of these models,' said Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT-Bombay, who is spearheading the project. The team has not only put out datasets relevant to the Indian knowledge systems but also others that can help in audio-visual learning, such as tutorials capturing practical skills like waste-to-toy creation or organic farming. There is also one on Sanskrit translation for contemporary prose, a math word problems dataset in Hindi and English which will train the AI in mathematical reasoning, and culturally-grounded multi-lingual question-answering datasets, including questions and answers from historian Dharampal's books, among others. One of the datasets also enables the AI to answer questions about images using external knowledge, and another interesting one is on recognising text in videos with camera movements. Most of these models are trained from scratch, not just fine-tuned, said Prof Ramakrishnan. The models also uniquely balance Indian data alongside English data, ensuring relevance to our country, he said. 'We are creating benchmarks for the AI ecosystem in the country, but these can be pulled out by researchers, enterprisers, companies, or even academia and developed further,' he added.
