Indian Government Launches AI Compute Portal, Dataset Repository AIKosha to Boost Innovation

The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives on Thursday. The announcements were made on the occasion of the first anniversary of the IndiaAI Mission, which is on March 7. Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw unveiled the India AI Compute Portal during an event, which will provide accessible and affordable AI compute, network, storage, platform, and cloud services. AIKosha, an online repository containing datasets and AI models, was also introduced by the minister.

MeitY Unveils Key AI Initiatives

According to a Press Information Bureau (PIB) report, Vaishnaw spoke at a New Delhi event and announced the launch of AIKosha and the AI Compute Portal. The former is a secure platform that comes with a repository of datasets, AI models, and use cases that enable AI innovation. The platform also features a sandbox environment along with tools and tutorials to help developers test and deploy AI models.

The AI Compute Portal is aimed at providing businesses and developers with affordable AI processing and inference capabilities alongside facilities for network and storage. Vaishnaw highlighted that these two portals will enable AI research and innovation in India, PIB reported. He also added that the AI Compute Portal's website will initially provide access to 10,000 GPUs, and an additional 8,693 GPUs will be added in the future. The platform is aimed at providing compute services at a subsidised rate to support eligible startups, researchers, and enterprises.

Vaishnaw reportedly also spoke about the digital public infrastructure (DPI) framework for AI. In accordance with the framework, the datasets added to AIKosha were said to be ethically sourced and were content-focused to reduce reliance on synthetic and foreign data. Notably, AIKosha hosts more than 300 datasets and upwards of 80 AI models.

Apart from these, several other AI-focused initiatives were also announced at the event.

The Indian government released the AI Competency Framework for public sector officials. It is designed to equip officials with AI competency skills. iGOT-AI, an AI-powered personalised learning system for government officials was also unveiled. It is essentially a content recommendation system that will provide educational material via the iGOT Karmayogi platform.

In collaboration with the French startup incubator Station F and business school HEC Paris, the IndiaAI Mission announced the launch of a new acceleration programme for Indian AI startups. This will be a four-month programme, where the first month will be online and the next three will be hosted onsite at Station F in Paris. The programme will provide 10 selected AI startups with access to mentorship, networking, and global market expansion opportunities in Europe.

The 10,300 crore fund was also used to introduce the IndiaAI FutureSkills Fellowship. The fellowship is aimed at mitigating barriers to entry into AI programmes and will increase AI courses in undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D levels. IndiaAI is now disbursing tranches of the fellowship to students from various centrally funded institutes as well as other government and private academic institutions.

Further, IndiaAI Data Labs are being established in the country's tier 2 and tier 3 cities. These institutions will impart foundational level courses in data science. IndiaAI has developed two courses for the roles of Data Annotator and Data Curator, which are focused on sectors such as healthcare, education, manufacturing, and more.