In the Indian tech ecosystem, AI is finally catching up and is expected to grow stronger over the coming years. Right from military hardware to financial software packages, all of them now have AI as an element.
The ripple effects are already being felt, with companies as well as public sector organisations trying to integrate AI in every nook and corner of their resources. In 2023, the AI wave was felt hard due to ChatGPT being popularised and India becoming the second country sending most desktop traffic to the platform.
Out of all the brouhaha happened in 2023, here are 8 major AI events from India:
Fresh Off the Press is Ola’s Krutrim, which, as per CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, is “India’s first full-stack AI solution.” The tool translating to ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit has a UI/UX design similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company’s chief claimed that the model was trained on 2 trillion tokens, can understand over 20 Indian languages and generates content in about ten languages.
While Aggarwal proudly shared the announcement on social media platforms, he was trolled by the audience for releasing the lack of details regarding the model.
OpenAI’s Opening Inning in India
GPT designer OpenAI has announced it will host its first-ever developer gathering in Bengaluru, India, next month. Speaking at a session at the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) Summit, Anna Makanju, vice president of global affairs at OpenAI, said this gathering will mark the beginning of OpenAI’s involvement in the Indian market.
The company recently hired former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior advisor to facilitate talks with the government about AI policy.
Indian AI startup Sarvam AI released OpenHathi-Hi-v0.1, the first Hindi large language model in the OpenHathi series. The model is an extension of Meta’s Llama2-7B model and performs as well as GPT-3.5 on Indic languages.
The recently set up generative AI startup collaborated with academic partners at AI4Bharat to develop OpenHathi, who provided language resources and benchmarks.
LLM for Indian Farmers is Here
A startup founded by the son of an Indian farmer, KissanAI has built Dhenu 1.0, an agriculture language model. Tailored specifically for Indian agricultural practices, this bilingual model understands English, Hindi, and Hinglish queries to cater directly to farmers’ linguistic needs.
Founder Pratik Desai disclosed that Dhenu 1.0 was trained on datasets focused on agricultural practices. The model’s uniqueness lies in processing 300,000 instruction sets in both English and Hindi.
India to Replicate UPI with AI
Indian Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, while speaking at a Financial Express event said India has the opportunity to develop something sovereign and unique and in line with the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) like Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and Aadhar, in which India has found success. Now, with AI, India wants to take the same DPI approach.
The country’s flag carrier airline, Air India, has migrated to a cloud-only IT infrastructure, having closed its historic data centres in Mumbai and New Delhi.
This makes it one of the first major global airlines to have moved all computational workloads exclusively to the cloud infrastructure. The shift will result in nearly a million dollars of net savings yearly.
After the infamous Rashmika Mandana incident, the minister of state for IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, announced the appointment of a nodal officer to look at platforms’ safe harbour status.
He also said that the IT ministry would assist aggrieved users of social media platforms in filing FIRs if the need arose. Chandrasekhar announced this after meeting with social media companies, device manufacturers and telecom service providers in the morning.
The internet recently became amused at an Instagram Reel where Indian PM Narendra Modi can be heard “singing” a Bollywood song. The singing accompanies a picture of Modi sitting cross-legged, strumming a guitar. The video, made by creator @ai_whizwires using artificial intelligence, has over 3.4 million views.
“Before uploading [it], I was a little scared. But after it went live, everybody enjoyed it,” @ai_whizwires, who didn’t want to be identified by his real name over fear of political backlash (Rest of World).
