Amid India’s race against top global forces operating in the artificial intelligence sector, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that India will set up a national large language model (LLM) for AI research and also asked stakeholders for investments in the area.
Besides, he also said that the government has allocated INR 500 Cr to boost AI-driven education and research in the country.
PM Modi was virtually addressing a post-Budget webinar.
This also comes at a time when the Centre is giving a huge push to the development of AI models in the country through its IndiaAI mission.
In January, union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India is planning to build its own domestic large language model as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission.
The government has already given a green signal to procuring 18,693 graphics processing units or GPUs–high end chips needed to develop machine learning tools that can go into developing a foundational model.
Moreover, the Centre has also called out to Indian startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs to collaborate on building foundational AI models trained on Indian datasets. The selected entities will receive both direct as well as equity-based funding to fulfil the county’s AI ambitions.
Last month the prime minister co-chaired AI Action Summit in France where he addressed some of the global leaders, policymakers, and industry experts highlighting the shortcomings in the existing foundational models.
“If you upload your medical report to an AI app, it can explain in simple language, free of any jargon, what it means for your health. But, if you ask the same app to draw an image of someone writing with their Left hand, the app will most likely draw someone writing with their Right hand. Because that is what the training data is dominated by,” he said while flagging biases in AI models.
Moreover, PM Modi also underlined equitable distribution of resources to boost AI innovation around the world, especially in the Global South. He also urged the global powers to pool in resources to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the AI space.
Meanwhile, Tata Son’s chairman N Chandrasekaran warned against potential “digital colonisation” and said that it is imperative for India to develop sovereign AI capabilities.
“If we don’t develop sovereign AI capabilities, we have a major risk of having all our activities, languages and cultures being processed by AI engines that don’t understand India,” Chandresekaran said at the Mumbai Tech Week 2025 held on March 1.
