INDIA'S OWN CHATGPT

Efforts to build large language models, the backbone of AI chatbots, based on the country's needs are gathering pace, reports Shivani Shinde

- Shivani Shinde

The year 2023 has been all about Open AI's ChatGPT chatbot, a software application human-like designed to mimic conversation based user prompts. The year is ending on the note that India-based large language of Bhavish Aggarwal, chief executive officer of Ola Electric, announced Krutrim, an LLM his company describes as "India's own AI" (artificial intelligence). Aggarwal is not the first to venture into Indian LLMs. Bhashini, a government of India initiative, AI4Bharat of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Sarvam.ai, and project Vaani are some other such projects.

Creating an LLM trained on Indian languages is not easy. Experts say each language in India has a nuance of its own, so creating a ChatGPT-like product is an ambitious challenge.

Billionaire Vinod Khosla, a pioneer in Silicon Valley AI investments and an early supporter of OpenAI, said about Sarvam's $41 million fund-raise: "We need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise for building AI in and for India." To create an LLM three things matter the most: Access to data in the local language, computing power and third constant training of datasets.

All three conditions are hurdles when building an Indian LLM. That is unlike ChatGPT, which was primarily created in the English language and had access to ample amount of data.

Access to data in Indian languages is an issue to begin with.