Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is gearing up to launch the Indian version of ChatGPT next month to boost the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem. BharatGPT, a consortium backed by Reliance Industries and the country’s top engineering schools such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, has demonstrated the capabilities of the upcoming AI model, named Hanooman after the half-monkey Hindu deity. It will work similarly to OpenAI’s successful chatbot ChatGPT to offer answers and solutions to even complex problems with the help of generative AI.
Bloomberg has reported that the preview of Hanooman, which was run during a technology conference in Mumbai on Tuesday, showed a motorcycle mechanic in southern India talking to the bot in Tamil language, a bank employee using the AI tool in Hindi, and a developer in Hyderabad taking assistant of AI to write program code. Hanooman, if successful, will become the flagbearer of all the efforts from India in the field of generative artificial intelligence.
It is currently unclear what large language model (LLM) will power Hanooman. However, the report said the AI bot will work in 11 local languages and offer information across four main sectors: healthcare, governance, finance, and education. Hanooman will also offer a speech-to-text facility, which will make it more user-friendly, especially in a country where millions still cannot read or write.
The digital arm of Reliance Industries, Jio Infocomm has developed the model in collaboration with Indian Institutes of Technology from different locations and the government, which has time and again laid out its vision to make India an AI-driven economy.
A few startups such as Sarvam and Krutrim are also working towards creating open-sourced AI models with customisations for Indian users. These models are claimed to be different from the ones Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI are building. LLMs that power bots like ChatGPT have certain loopholes because of computational restraints and less complexity as they are often designed to be affordable for smaller businesses and governments. The ones being developed in India will belong to “a different genre of LLMs,” according to Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chair of IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
BharatGPT, which has the Indian government as one of its pivotal backers, has plans to take on the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini and become a major hub of AI development in the world. According to a joint study by Nasscom-BCG, India’s artificial intelligence market is projected to touch $17 billion by 2027, growing at an annualised rate of 25-35 percent between 2024 and 2027.
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