Indian AI: What is it, and can we make one?

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : Bhavish Aggarwal, cofounder of Ola Cabs, has announced a startup that he said is building “India’s own" foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model. The government, too, has been speaking about an India AI Programme. What exactly is ‘Indian’ AI? Mint decodes: What is colloquially referred to as ‘Indian’ AI is currently aspirational, referring to datasets that foundational AI models are trained on.

Researchers argue that the largely West- and English-centric internet will teach AI programs biases and sensibilities that are mostly tuned to Western countries. That’s why the Centre, researchers and industry veterans, speak about why AI in India would differ. Key variations would be in understanding non-English languages, and getting nuances of India-centric cases of harm, societal bias and polity.

Experts say such factors will make AI differ by region and culture. The ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity)’s upcoming AI policy—India AI Programme—will be announced on 10 January. A key part will be around creating datasets, where a ministry-affiliated data governance office will handle anonymized and non-personal user-data collected through Central government affiliates and private organizations.

This dataset will include languages spoken in India. To be sure, the latest generation foundational models from the likes of OpenAI and Google already include Indic language databases, but they use English data for primary training. Meity says researchers will have access to this Indic language database, making it a research repository.