IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw turns on IndiaAI compute portal providing 14,000 GPUs

Startups, researchers, application developers and others can now make use of 14,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) of the IndiaAI Compute Portal, with 4,000 more under development, said union electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday.

The government is in the process of considering 67 applications for an Indian foundational model, out of which 22 are large language models, he said.

Quarter by quarter, we will keep adding GPUs," Vaishnaw replied, stating that most of the common compute facility would be utilized in developing India's own foundation model.

"I've instructed the team, pick up the applications that are highly mature, and take at least three or five of them, so that we start working on it.

Vaishnaw also inaugurated AI Kosha, the IndiaAI Datasets Platform, among others under the IndiaAI Mission, a year since it was launched with a Rs 10,000 crore outlay.

Data that is non-personal in nature from several ministries and departments such as those of the agriculture department, meteorology, logistics, and datasets on Bhashini, which is the government portal for translating Indian languages, can be used for model training on AI Kosha, according to Vaishnaw. The government also negotiates with the private players for them to donate non-personal data to the platform.

An AI Competency Framework was initiated for civil servants' capacity building, as was iGOT AI under the iGOT Karmayogi government capacity building platform to suggest courses specific to civil servants' jobs. Additionally, 27 AI data labs are being established in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, Vaishnaw stated.

More than a million civil servants have enrolled for AI courses on the platform to date, and close to 950,000 of them have completed them, he added.

The GPU center will be accessible for Rs 67 per GPU hour. "The manner in which we launched a mission to the moon at a fraction of the price at which the developed world did, we'll have our base model also at a fraction of the price that some of the rich world nations have done," Vaishnaw stated.

The world actually values the concept that we are investing public money in building a shared compute facility, while in most other places the compute facility is owned by large corporations," he said.

India will also have its own GPU chips in three to four years, Vaishnaw stated, and India will be among the top five tech countries in five years across fields such as AI, semiconductors, and deeptech.

The US's 50,000 limit on GPU exports to nations such as India does not impact us, Vaishnaw stated.

Addressing the launch, Meity secretary S Krishnan explained regarding the recent investments witnessed in the US, "If you look at that $500 billion, it's by a group of private investors, to be invested not only in the United States but around the world over several years, and not one rupee or not $1 of that is actually from the government.". Whereas, in this case, we have a very concentrated and very defined program of how one would actually go about rolling out artificial intelligence adoption on a nationwide scale, through seven very defined verticals that will aid each aspect of what needs to take place.

IndiaAI Mission CEO Abhishek Singh called on more government agencies and departments to join the initiative in adding value to the datasets platform, and asserted collaborations with startups and industry would be pivotal in fulfilling India's massive expectations from AI.

The ministry also declared the top 30 AI solutions from the IndiaAI Innovation Challenge under themes such as healthcare, learning disabilities, and governance, the IndiaAI Startups Acceleration Program with Station F, and identified students who are receiving fellowships under the skilling pillar of the IndiaAI Mission.

India is taking a techno-legal path to AI, Vaishnaw added. For example, under the AI safety pillar, IIT Jodhpur has created a deepfake detection tool.

The government is also reviewing the recommendations that have been received during consultations on the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which is in its "final lap", Vaishnaw added.