IndiaAI Mission on Friday announced the selection of three more startups, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, and Gan.AI, to develop indigenous foundation models. This brings the number of startups under the foundation model development initiative to four, including the recently announced Sarvam AI.
“These three teams also have a very big target in front of them. Whichever sector they focus on, they must become among the top five in the world. That’s a clear target,” said Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Soket AI founded by Abhishek Upperwal, will develop India’s first open-source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country’s linguistic diversity, targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare, and education.
Similarly, Gnani.ai, co-founded by Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj, will build a 14 billion-parameter Voice AI foundation model that delivers multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities. Gan.ai focuses on foundational models for audio and video and is building AI avatar video creation tools.
Vaishnaw added that one of the selected startups expressed interest in becoming number one or two in its chosen domain. “That’s the spirit with which teams are working. I’m glad,” he said. He also noted that the initiative could help bring back Indian talent from abroad, and what used to be a brain drain should now be a reverse brain drain.
Vaishnaw also shared that 367 datasets have already been uploaded to AI Kosha, India’s open repository of curated AI datasets.
Alongside the new startup selections, the government announced the second round of AI compute empanelment under the IndiaAI Compute Pillar. This includes an additional 15,000 GPUs on top of the existing 18,000, bringing the total available GPU compute capacity to 34,000.
The new empanelled companies for GPU sourcing are Netmagic (NTT Global), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech.
Cyfuture India will provide a range of GPUs, including NVIDIA H100, L40S, A100, AMD MI300X, MI325X, and Intel’s Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3. Ishan Infotech will offer H100, H200, and L4 models.
Netmagic will supply H100, H200, L40S, and L4 GPUs, along with AMD MI300X. Sify Digital Services will provide H100, H200, and L4. Locuz Enterprise Solutions will offer the H200. Vensysco Technologies will provide H100 and A100. Yotta Data Services will supply the NVIDIA B200.
This expanded compute capacity on cloud will provide a common platform for sourcing of critical GPUs for key tasks in the development of AI solution.
The IndiaAI mission’s compute pillar has so far operated through public-private partnerships with companies such as Jio Platforms, NxtGen Data Centre, Locuz Enterprise, E2E Networks, CtrlS DataCenters, CMS Computers, Orient Technologies, Tata Communications, Vensysco, and Yotta Data Services.
With Inputs from Sanjana Gupta
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