IndiaAI receives 506 foundation AI model proposals
The country's push to build artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities is getting an overwhelming response, with IndiaAI Mission on Friday revealing 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.Further selections will be announced shortly, IndiaAI said.Sarvam's model will have 70 billion parameters.The multi-modal, multi-scale Indian foundation models will open up a "universe of applications" for citizens and enterprises, Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan had said on April 26. The model will be completed in six months, he had said.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. These include 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 (GPU) 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.
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