India Launches BharatGen: World's First Govt-Funded Multilingual AI LLM
Introduction
BharatGen, world’s first government-funded multimodal large language model (LLM) has been launched by India. The initiative was taken by the Department of Science and Technology’s National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), IIT Bombay, the aim of BharatGen is to give a new meaning to Artificial Intelligence in India by connecting the models that they will be creating to India’s linguistic, cultural and socio-economic diversity.
Also Read- CISOs Increasingly Rely on AI to Navigate Cost Pressures and Enhance Resilience: Wipro Report
Key Features of BharatGen
Main distinguishing features of BharatGen are as follows:
- Multilingual and Multimodal Models: The focus is on creating AI models that assist in processing and generating text, speech, and various visual content in different languages spoken in India. The aim is to promote linguistic inclusion.
- India-Centric Dataset: Importance is given to the development of datasets reflecting linguistic and cultural richness of India. Main objective is to provide the data that is correct and has an accurate representation.
- Open-Source Development: BharatGen operates on an open-source platform and thus allows people who call themselves researchers and innovators to access AI tools and build applications without any cost, or at bare minimum one.
- Generative AI Research Ecosystem: A vibrant AI research community is expected to develop. Achieving collaborations through hackathons, training programs, and global partnerships is one of the objectives.
Implementation and Collaborations
With academic partners from prestigious universities like IIT Bombay, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Madras, the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay is spearheading the BharatGen implementation.
Vision for the Future
The introduction of BharatGen brings in alignment with the vision of Aamanirbhar Bharat, where the model is solely developed in India. The idea of being self-reliant is given more importance and the introduction of the model strengthens the country’s AI ecosystem for startups, industries, and government agencies.
