AI Mission should focus on core tech to avoid errors made in chips, smartphones
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Centre’s India AI Mission, which seeks to bring India up to speed with the US, China and the rest of the world in artificial intelligence (AI), could be pivotal for India to avoid repeating the mistakes it made with semiconductor and mobile phone manufacturing, industry veterans told Mint.
On Saturday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a fiscal outlay of ₹2,000 crore ($230 million) for the Mission. The move succeeded the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) announcing last Thursday that a repository of 18,693 graphic processing units (GPUs), provided by private sector companies, was ready to be used as an on-cloud supercomputing service to help train AI models.
Startups and academia members will get access to the computing platform after being vetted by Meity-appointed officials on merit. A senior government official said, requesting anonymity, that the platform that enables access to GPUs to startups is ready, and the framework to decide who gets access to the central compute infrastructure under the AI Mission “will be decided soon." “We’re taking all steps to ensure that foundational AI work happens at the fastest possible pace.
Beyond the ₹2,000-crore allotment, if we need more capital, there’s room for that as well," the official said. Also read | Computers unleashed economic growth. Will artificial intelligence? IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said during the Mission's press briefing on Thursday that Meity is “already in contact with six major startups, which will be able to build a foundational AI model with Indic language datasets in the next six to 10 months." Industry stakeholders largely lauded the move but cautioned that a prompt phase of
. Read more on livemint.com
