BharatGPT is all about bringing India (Bharat) to a leadership position in tech. “My key motivation behind BharatGPT is to not lose this ideological or civilisational war in the tech space,” said IIM Indore professor Aditya Maheshwari, in an exclusive interaction with AIM. 

The BharatGPT team currently comprises distinguished professors from IITs across India. Led by Ganesh Ramakrishnan, a professor at IIT Bombay, the team includes professors Rohit Saluja from IIT Mandi, V Kamakoti from IIT Madras, Arnab Bhattacharya from IIT Kanpur, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar & Mohan Raghavan from IIT Hyderabad, Kshitij Jadhav from IIT Bombay, Maheshwari from IIM Indore and Ravi Kiran from IIIT Hyderabad.

Each member brings a unique expertise and experience to the project, contributing to the consortium’s mission with their collaborative efforts and collective knowledge.

“It is a collaboration of academicians, not driven by profit. We don’t see any LLM coming from India as a competitor,” said Maheshwari, who is from IIM Indore and oversees the techno-management and managerial aspects, including team formation, at BharatGPT. He highlighted that BharatGPT focuses strongly on India-centric models to prevent the nation from falling behind while the West makes substantial progress.

The BharatGPT initiative started in February last year under Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor (IIT Bombay). It is a consortium or ecosystem formed to build India-centric LLMs specifically to fulfil the demands of developers and enterprises. The consortium has received tremendous support from the tech community, like Jio chairman Akash Ambani announcing a partnership for the mission. 

Projects and Partnerships

Regarding partnerships, Maheshwari said that they are in touch with Jio. “We are in talks with Jio, and our Principal Investigator, Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, also had a conversation over email with Mukesh Ambani,” he said.

Maheshwari mentioned that they have an MOU with the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) to develop an instruction-fine-tuned chatbot for handling customer complaints. “This is one MOU IIT Bombay had with the DARPG, Government of India, and we have delivered the first phase of that project,” said Maheshwari. 

Most recently, IIT Bombay has been collaborating with Seetha Mahalaxmi Healthcare (SML) to build India’s first AI multimodal Hanooman. However, apart from Jio and SML, BharatGPT has also been in touch with several other companies, which they will disclose later, said Maheshwari.

The Vision of BharatGPT

“Our first vision is to lead in generative AI, which is a vision shared with Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemini, as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT,” said Maheshwari. Another important vision of BharatGPT is grassroots innovation, creating an ecosystem where startups and developers can easily benefit from generative AI infrastructure, according to Maheshwari. 

Furthermore, a third key focus is on cultural preservation. “Culture innovation or centrality on the Indian knowledge system is one of the key pillars of the BharatGPT ecosystem,” said Maheshwari.

Bharat Data Sagar 

“Our key activity is to create large language models, but we’re not limited to just that. Apart from developing LLMs in multiple languages, as a primary activity, we also focus on knowledge generation,” said Maheshwari. 

He added that BharatGPT is developing India-centric datasets named Bharat Data Sagar, and noted that Bhashini is also a partner within the BharatGPT ecosystem. “We are not competitors but collaborators of Bhashini,” he said.

Maheshwari further added that BharatGPT would help companies and startups fine-tune their models. He also expressed interest in training and scaling generative AI expertise, both nationally and globally. “We have plans to conduct hackathons and workshops”, he said.

“We will invite all government, non-government, and private bodies to share their data and partner with Bharat Data Sagar. In return, they may receive tokenised priority access to BharatGPT LLMs among other benefits,” he said.