Mint Explainer | Will 2026 be a turning point for AI in India?
Mint examines what lies ahead for AI in India in the coming year.In a way, yes. India will host the next global AI summit, scheduled for 15 February in New Delhi.
The IT ministry confirmed on Monday that one of the intended goals would be to have at least one government-backed AI entity showcase its foundational AI model by then, as proof that AI trained primarily on non-English language datasets can achieve performance standards comparable to those of global AI systems.Government insiders have said that at least one such model is nearly ready, and could mark the start of deployment of what has so far been called ‘sovereign’ AI models—algorithms used in generative intelligence that have been fully trained, built and optimized in India.Languages and datasets are expected to experience a significant surge in demand next year. Open-source datasets, such as Google’s Project Vaani and Meity’s Bhashini, have opened up access to public data of 22 Indian languages, which any startup or commercial entity can view and use.A new crop of Indian companies is further seeking to be data brokers by licensing data from publishers that own little-known content in obscure languages.
These ‘brokers’ then collate and annotate the data, in turn making these datasets ready to be read by machines. In the coming year, this is expected to lead to a significant shift in the availability of AI data.
That’s hard to tell. Meity’s proposed labelling of AI content on social media has raised concerns about how creative marketing’s use of AI is impacted.A proposal by the department for promotion of industry and internal trade (DPIIT) to offer copyright royalties from AI developers is another key point of contention, with discussions about the viability
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