DST Announces New Hub with BharatGPT for Building LLMs in Indian Languages

BharatGPT is back with its dedication to building language models for India, in India. In a recent conference, the Department of Science & Technology (DST) announced that it is starting a new hub for creating Indic language models in collaboration with BharatGPT.

This new hub, BharatGPT, is created in collaboration with IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Mandi. The initiative aims to create LLMs in India languages, for India, along with applications for Indian enterprises.

Moreover, the recent Indian chatbot Hanooman, released by SML is also powered by IIT Bombay's projects. The project includes multilingual and multimodal capabilities. 

In an interview with AIM, Professor Ganesh Ramakrishan from IIT Bombay, who is leading the BharatGPT initiative said that India needs to build foundational models from scratch. “An ecosystem for building multi-lingual and multi-modal foundational models is what will open up a faithful avenue for Indian languages. You will hear about it soon,” Ramakrishnan said about the rise of several Indic LLMs.

“The intention is that everyone gets to use them in India and there is widespread adoption by the Indian startups, not just providing models, but also giving recipes on how to build AI models.”

Ramakrishnan also emphasised that the solutions need to be developed across different verticals as well such as banking, healthcare, farming, etc. “Mistral got France on the AI map. We want India to get on the AI map with BharatGPT.” 

SML’s Hanooman is named after the Hindu deity Hanuman. “Hanuman is a great example of responsible power. Despite being the most-powerful entity, he never used his power for selfish needs,” said Vishnu Vardhan, founder of SML and Vizzhy, in an exclusive interview with AIM.