Lightspeed Venture and Peak XV-backed Sarvam AI could emerge as the first to develop India’s own AI platform in the next six months.
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that Sarvam AI, headquartered in Bangalore, has been selected to develop India’s first GenAI platform.
“We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models,” Vaishnaw said.
The minister asked for a timeline for developing the platform from Sarvam founders, who committed that it would be done in six months.
“Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country. As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are developing three model
variants,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar said.
The government will allocate 400 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to Sarvam for six months for the development of India’s own large language models with 70 billion parameters.
India has announced an ambitious plan to scale up in the AI space with IndiaAI mission announced in 2024. The government has allocated ₹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 equipped with 18,693 GPUs, a capacity that is significantly higher than that of the open-source AI model DeepSeek and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a statement from the ministry of electronics and IT said in March.
Component scheme
Electronics component makers will have to set up design teams and achieve Six Sigma level in their work to avail the incentive scheme of the government, Union minister Vaishnaw said on Saturday.
The minister said that Meity will not make it a formal criterion but will look at these factors before approving applications for the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS).
The goal of Six Sigma — a set of methodologies and tools — is to achieve a level of quality that is nearly perfect. This is done by reducing defects and errors, minimising variation, and increasing quality and efficiency.
He was speaking while launching a portal on guidelines for ECMS. With an outlay of ₹22,919 crore, the scheme was approved by the cabinet in March.