Telangana's AI Summit: A Catalyst for Innovation and Collaboration

Slew of MoUs announced at AI Summit

A clutch of memoranda of understanding, as part of which more than 20 entities committed to work with Telangana government in the area of Artificial Intelligence, were announced at Global AI Summit inaugural session here on Thursday. Towards enhancing the computational resources in the State, required for AI systems, the State government signed an MoU each with Yotta and C-DAC. Yotta will design and construct a specialised AI-Data Centre in Hyderabad, IT and Industries Minister D. Sridhar Babu's office said in a release. Another set of MoUs were aimed at talent and skill development among youth in the State. As part of these with NxtWave, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, more than 2.5 lakh students and professionals in the State are to be benefited. The government also entered into a comprehensive and strategic 3-year partnership with global giant Nvidia Corporation to accelerate AI adoption in the State. It will be partnering with PATH and Nazara Technologies to build centres of excellence focused on AI. Towards leveraging the potential of Generative AI technologies, MoUs were signed with Meta and OpenAI as well as with Digital India Bhashini Division. The government will be joining hands with global research centre Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to establish an AI Research Lab dedicated to leveraging AI to improve governance services and processes across various sectors, including agriculture, health, and education, the Minister's office said. IT and Industries Secretary said two dozens MoUs were signed on the first day of the summit. Separately, in a release, Meta said the partnership forged with the State government is to enhance e-governance and citizen services using AI technologies. Under the two-year partnership with Telangana Department of Information Technology, Electronics and Communications (IT, E&C), the objective is to empower public officials and citizens with latest emerging technologies like AI to enhance e-governance and citizen services. Meta said it will collaborate with the State government to enable deployment of e-governance solutions leveraging Meta's open-source Generative AI technologies including the latest Llama 3.1 model. This will be geared towards transforming various aspects of public service delivery and e-governance, along with enhancing efficiency and productivity of government departments and agencies through the use of Gen AI. Published - September 06, 2024 12:20 am IST Read Comments

'India AI Mission official pat for Telangana'

The Centre's India Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission that has kickstarted work on building a comprehensive ecosystem to foster AI innovation in the country views Telangana as a very promising partner, a senior official in the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said here on Thursday. The government of India may lay down the policies and provide funding, but the actual implementation happens at the State level. "We look at Telangana as a very promising partner of the India AI Mission," Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh said, pointing to how the State has emerged as an AI leader. It had declared 2020 as the year of AI and taken initiatives to establish an AI City as well as extend incentives to companies for setting up data centres. Mr.Singh, who spoke to media on the sidelines of the two-day Global AI Summit that began in Hyderabad, said various other States, including Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, were giving incentives to companies for setting up data centres. "We hope some of the AI compute infrastructure we are setting up will come up in such progressive States," he said. On the AI application development front, Telangana has been a leader in providing data sets and trying to give incentives to startups. It has also initiated several used cases. "Telangana is a progressive State which kind of incentivise adoption of AI solutions..." he said. To queries on the IndiaAI Mission, Mr.Singh said the Mission has been approved and based on seven pillars by democratising computing access, foundational models, application development, datasets, skilling, startups and framework for safe and trusted AI. Among the measures initiated is the floating of an RFP for empanelling service providers who can offer compute infrastructure to those who need such as researchers, startups and academicians. Government will subsidise the cost of access to the users. Several companies had evinced interest in the pre-bid meeting and atleast 10,000 GPUs are likely to be set up under the project. The project apart, companies have also announced plans to establish GPUs and "with the kind of commitments 50,000 GPUs could be established within 2-3 years in the country," he said. The Mission is also scouting for a national data management officer. Published - September 05, 2024 09:15 pm IST Read Comments