IndiaAI Mission Receives 506 Foundation AI Model Proposals, Extends Deadline

IndiaAI receives 506 foundation AI model proposals

IndiaAI Mission's initiative to bolster AI capabilities has seen significant interest, receiving 506 foundation AI proposals. Due to the overwhelming response, the submission deadline for phase 3 has been extended. Sarvam.ai has been selected to develop an indigenous foundational model with 70 billion parameters, expected to be completed in six months.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.

IndiaAI Receives Over 500 Foundation Model Proposals Across Three Phases

Notably, 120 applications came in the second round, while the Mission received 67 proposals in the initial round As the country accelerates its efforts to build AI infrastructure, IndiaAI Mission said it has received 506 proposals to build the AI foundational models across three phases. "Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the deadline for submission under Phase 3 of the call for proposals was extended, with the revised deadline being April 30," IndiaAI Mission said on its website. 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. Of the total bids, the Centre received 120 applications in the second round and around 67 proposals were received in the initial round. The IndiaAI Mission also said that as part of the first phase of approvals, one startup is picked to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model, while further selections are expected to be announced shortly. The government engaged in the process of floating a proposal to build an Indian foundational AI model, earlier in January this year, as "foreign" foundational models are trained on western data sets and are not aligned with Indian languages and situations.