Ashwini Vaishnaw Flags Off India’s AI Revolution: Sarvam AI to Build Nation’s First Homegrown Foundational Model

In an unprecedented announcement today, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI was selected to develop the first AI foundational model for India. Sarvam AI was selected as part of the IndiaAI Mission process after a competitive process called the 'AI Foundational Model PRIDE' that had 67 mission proposals submitted from across India. 

 

Sarvam AI will be allocated dedicated compute resources to build the model from the ground up with a focus on reasoning, voice, and fluency in multiple Indian languages. The vision of this project is to empower the development and secure deployment of large AI present solutions for users in India with relevance to Indian enterprises and citizens. The foundational model will be developed, deployed, and optimized entirely in India leveraging wholly Indian talent and data. 

 

Dr. Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam AI stated, "We are humbled by the responsibility to develop India's sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that truly reaches every corner of the country. This is the first step in building critical national AI infrastructure." The roadmap for the models is Sarvam-Large for the advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real time applications, and Sarvam-Edge for on-device use cases. Sarvam AI is also working with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras to support AI applied research in using Indian languages as a part of their model work. 

 

Minister Vaishnaw expressed confidence that Sarvam's models will stand shoulders and toes with leading global offerings in AI, and reiterated that two to three more startups along with Sarvam AI would join the initiative. The mission is to fundamentally shape strategic autonomy in India's increasingly innovative AI ecosystem, with commitment from government funding for the broader IndiaAI Mission

 

Source: Financial Express