Knowledge Nugget | Sarvam and IndiaAI Mission: All you need to know for UPSC Exam

Why in the news?

The government has selected Bengaluru-based start-up Sarvam to build the country’s first indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) amid waves made by China’s low cost model DeepSeek. The start-up, chosen from among 67 applicants, will receive support from the government in terms of compute resources to build the model from scratch.

Key Takeaways :

1. Sarvam is the first start-up to get approved for sops under India’s ambitious Rs 10,370 crore IndiaAI Mission to build a model, with the government currently assessing hundreds of other proposals.

2. Sarvam said its model will be capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, and it will be ready for population-scale deployment.

3. A senior official said in terms of government support, the company will receive access to 4,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months for the company to build and train its model.

4. The model is not expected to be open-sourced, but will be fine-tuned particularly for Indian languages. The GPUs will be provided to Sarvam by companies separately selected by the government to set up AI data centres in India.

5. As part of Sarvam’s LLM proposal, the company is developing three model variants:

(i) Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation

(ii) Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications

(iii) Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks

6. Sarvam’s model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India, using local infrastructure and developed by a new generation of Indian talent. This initiative aims to promote strategic autonomy, accelerate domestic innovation, and secure India’s leadership in AI for the long term, the company said in a press statement.

IndiaAI Mission 

1. The IndiaAI Mission seeks to create a comprehensive ecosystem that encourages AI innovation by democratising computing access, improving data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, facilitating industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects, and promoting ethical AI.

2. Objectives of the mission are:

— To implement intelligent systems in a variety of decision-making processes, improve connection, and increase productivity.

— To apply intelligent systems to meet India’s societal demands in sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture, smart cities, infrastructure, and mobility.

— To generate new information and build novel applications for intelligent systems.

3. This mission promotes the responsible and inclusive growth of India’s AI ecosystem through the following seven pillars:

(i) IndiaAI Compute Capacity

(ii) IndiaAI Innovation Centre

(iii) IndiaAI Datasets platform

(iv) IndiaAI Application development initiative

(v) IndiaAI Future skills

(vi) IndiaAI Startup Financing

(vii) Safe and Trusted AI

Challenges associated with IndiaAI

1. Limited AI expertise and lack of investment to implement AI solutions

2. Lack of AI and cloud computing infrastructure

3. Lack of data and poor data quality

4. Data security and privacy issues

5. Lack of integrity and ethics with AI and ML solutions

BEYOND THE NUGGET: What is an LLM?

1. According to Google, LLMs are large general-purpose language models that can be pre-trained and then fine-tuned for specific purposes. In simple words, these models are trained to solve common language problems such as text classification, question answering, text generation across industries, document summarisation, etc.

2. The LLMs can also be tailored to solve specific problems in a variety of domains such as finance, retail, entertainment, etc., using perhaps a relatively small size of field datasets.

3. The meaning of LLMs can be understood with its three primary features. Firstly, the ‘Large’ indicates two meanings — the enormous size of training data; and the parameter count. In Machine Learning, parameters, also known as hyperparameters, are essentially the memories and knowledge that a machine learned during its model training. Parameters define the skill of the model in solving a specific problem.

4. The second most important thing to understand about LLM is the General Purpose. This means the model is sufficient to solve general problems that are based on the commonality of human language regardless of specific tasks, and resource restrictions.

5. In essence, an LLM is like a super smart computer program that can comprehend and create human-like text. It is trained on massive data sets which are essentially patterns, structures, and relationships with languages. An LLM can also be seen as a tool that helps computers understand and produce human language.

Post Read Question

With the present state of development, Artificial Intelligence can effectively do which of the following? (UPSC CSE 2020)

1. Bring down electricity consumption in industrial units

2. Create meaningful short stories and songs

3. Disease diagnosis

4. Text-to-Speech Conversion

5. Wireless transmission of electrical energy

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1, 2, 3 and 5 only

(b) 1, 3 and 4 only

(c) 2, 4 and 5 only

(d) 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

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