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Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday that the government is working on a PhD programme so that the Artificial Intelligence mission could fund the basic fundamental research in AI.
"It will really bring new opportunities for us and for the IT industry, which will go through a major transition period," the minister told an AI-focused event. "We should be able to capture this transition as an opportunity rather than getting disrupted by it, because whenever such a large technological change happens, it's very important that the industry and the government and the talent development ecosystem, they should all work together to make sure that we get prepared for the changing times," he supplemented. Speaking about the potential of AI, he said AI in itself may not mean much, but when it is applied to various sectors, it can really make a big difference in solving problems at the population level and on a large scale. The focus of his government is very clear - a vision of democratising technology, he said. "It's very important that technology should not be left in the hands of a few," he supplemented. "It's very important that a larger section of the society should have access to technology, should be able to develop new solutions, have better opportunities." Supplementing the democratisation of technology, he said about 19,000 GPUs have already been deployed. The second round of empanelment may create another 16,000 GPUs, taking the total to 34,000 GPUs. "It's a very big, large, significantly large number of compute. And this is a continuous process," Minister Vaishnaw said. "The 3rd round will also be completed very soon. That will bring another round of GPUs. In a sense, what we were some time back worried about whether India will be able to get that kind of compute facility or not. It was a big worry in the minds of many policymakers...but now practically those worries are over, with 34,000 GPUs, the compute facility is very significant," the minister said. On the AI front, India will soon have its first foundational Artificial Intelligence model, the minister has indicated on several occasions recently. The government is going to host an open-source model on Indian servers. This comes as Chinese startup DeepSeek has challenged the AI world. India is rapidly building a strong AI computing and semiconductor infrastructure to support its growing digital economy. With the approval of the IndiaAI Mission in 2024, the government allocated Rs 10,300 crore over five years to strengthen AI capabilities. A key focus of this mission is the development of a high-end common computing facility AI as a technology has just begun, and the number of innovations that one can see going forward is going to be phenomenal. (ANI)
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