In ChatGPT's shadow, India readies for aggressive AI play

The government has identified nine key focus areas in the AI national programme, including agriculture, education, Indian languages, smart cities, cybersecurity, transportation, and finance.

India is making an aggressive play in artificial intelligence (AI) with twin objectives of "making AI in India and making AI work for India".

In this direction and against the backdrop of the revolutionary transition in AI brought in by ChatGPT, the government is expanding the INDIAai initiative in partnership with Indian tech companies, start-ups, and academic institutions.

The arrival of ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer), developed by OpenAI, has changed the AI land space, with companies globally rushing to come out with similar advanced chatbots.

Microsoft recently announced upgrading its search engine Bing and browser Edge with ChatGPT; this move forced Google, the king of the search engine market, to scramble and announce a rival AI Bard.

Companies in China like Baidu are also expected to build homegrown chatbots based on GPT technology.

GPT is a neural machine learning trained using internet data to generate any type of text.

Explaining the broader vision behind the AI push, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said: "India has the best talent for AI in the world.

"The government is setting up three centres of excellence for AI (which were announced in the Budget) and we will make AI in India and make AI work for India."

Giving details of the new collaborative strategic model, Minister of State for IT and Electronics Rajiv Chandrasekhar said: "INDIAai is being expanded as a partnership with Indian tech companies, start-ups, and academic institutions under a comprehensive AI programme that consists of the National Data Governance Framework Policy, an Indian datasets programme, and setting up of three AI Centres of Excellence (in top educational universities)."

Chandrasekhar pointed out that the ecosystem of start-ups in India is vibrant and covers many AI applications which include GPT. But there are many other training and learning models, too, he noted.

The government has identified nine key focus areas in the AI national programme, including agriculture, education, Indian languages, smart cities, cybersecurity, transportation, and finance.

Vaishnaw said the ministry of electronics and information technology has undertaken a lot of work in the AI space in solutions for varied Indian languages where ChatGPT has already been integrated.

"One good example is Bhasini -- a natural language AI platform, which enables automated language translation and is already being integrated with ChatGPT."

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her recent Budget announced that in order to unleash innovation and research by start-ups and academia, a National Data Governance Policy would be brought in.

A draft policy by MeitY envisaged the setting up of an India Data Management Office (IDMO) under Digitial India Corporation for an institutional framework with guidelines and protocols to share non-personal data.

The IDMO will coordinate with central ministries and state governments to standardise the management of this data.

The Centre has also clarified that non-personal data, which will be shared, shall be limited to data available with the government like that of weather or climate, among others.

This data, for instance, when powered by AI tools, can help agriculture in predicting monsoons and other factors.

The government has also put together the open government data platform for a single-point access to resources in an open format published by ministries, government departments, and organisations.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com