BharatGen, a pioneering initiative in generative AI, was launched in India on September 30, 2024, in Delhi. The initiative is designed to revolutionize public service delivery and boost citizen engagement by developing a suite of foundational models in language, speech, and computer vision.
The event convened in the virtual presence of Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Earth Sciences, MoS PMO, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Space and MoS Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
“BharatGen is a proud example of India’s commitment to advancing homegrown technologies. It positions India as a global leader in the field of Generative AI, much like our achievements with UPI and other innovations that have transformed various sectors,” said Dr Jitendra Singh during the inauguration.
He added that this initiative marks the world’s first government-funded Multimodal Large Language Model project focused on creating efficient and inclusive AI in Indian languages.
About BharatGen
- Aim: To revolutionize public service delivery and enhance citizen engagement by developing foundational models in language, speech, and computer vision.
- Implementation: By IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS)
- Key Features of BharatGen:
- Multilingual and multimodal foundation models.
- Building and training based on India-centric datasets.
- Open-source platform for fostering AI research and innovation.
- The project is expected to be completed by 2026, with ongoing research, development, and scaling of AI applications.
Significance
- BharatGen will address both text and speech, ensuring representation across India’s diverse linguistic landscape. By using multilingual datasets, it will capture the nuances of Indian languages, which are often underrepresented in global AI models.
- This emphasis on data sovereignty gives India greater control over its digital resources and narrative.
- BharatGen will democratize AI access across government, education, and private sectors, ensuring AI benefits all segments of society, particularly underserved Indian languages.
- BharatGen aligns with the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat by developing AI models specifically for India. By building these technologies domestically
What are Large Language Models?
- Large language models, also known as LLMs, are very large deep learning models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data.
- Large Language Models (LLMs) use machine learning techniques to recognize, interpret, and generate human languages or other complex data.
- Their capabilities also extend to handling structured and unstructured data, including speech, images, and other multimodal inputs, which enhances their utility in fields like customer service, healthcare, and education.
About MLLM and Generative AI
MLLM are Large Language Models (LLM) trained on large datasets including both text and non-textual data (image,
audio, video, etc.) LLM uses machine learning and is capable of recognizing and interpreting human languages or other
complex data. Generative AI is the most well-known application of LLM.
Generative AI (GenAI)
It is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that automatically generates content in response to prompts written in natural language conversational interfaces.
– Rather than simply curating existing web pages, by drawing on existing content, GenAI actually produces new content.
– The content can appear in formats that comprise all symbolic representations of human thinking: texts written in natural language, images (including photographs to digital paintings and cartoons), videos, music and software code.
– GenAI is trained using data collected from web pages, social media conversations and other online media. It generates its content by statistically analysing the distributions of words, pixels or other elements in the data that it has ingested and identifying and repeating common patterns.
– In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) to the public.