India to have foundational AI model in 10 months from now, says minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

NEW DELHI: India will have its first foundational Artificial Intelligence model in at maximum 10 months from now, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said Tuesday.

The government is going to host an open source model like Chinese ‘DeepSeek’ on Indian servers. This comes at a time when Chinese startup has challenged the AI world.

Speaking at the India Today-Business Today Budget Roundtable, the minister said one must look at the entire India AI mission in a more comprehensive manner. He said India has already approved the AI mission last year, with about Rs 10,000 crore allocation.

1. India is building foundational AI models using 18,000+ high-end GPUs and large non-personal datasets. Startups have already begun work following the government’s call for proposals. pic.twitter.com/G7wpHijPju

— Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) February 4, 2025

“(Like) in the Digital India programme, in most of the things that our prime minister has done for digitalization, this (AI) program also looks at democratizing access to technology, democratizing access to compute power, making sure that more and more people get opportunities to create their foundational and other models and applications”, Vaishnaw said.

The minister added India already embarked for 18,000 high-end GPUs. Out of that, 10,000 are already available. “To make a model, the first thing that you need is compute power. So how do we get the compute power? Either people who have deep pockets, they can buy compute power, or we create a structure where the government puts in a mechanism where people put in the compute power, and that is made accessible to everybody”, he explained.

Asserting that the AI as a technology has just begun, the minister said the amount of innovations that one would see going ahead is going to be phenomenal. Citing a Stanford study, he said India ranks among the top four countries in terms of ability to innovate.

“So we are very confident that our country will be among the leaders in this technology. There is no question of not being able to harness the power of technology,” he said, referring to AI. He also foresees that AI models will increasingly get commoditized as they solve population-level problems.

He cited an instance where the Indian Railways used AI to make ticketing efficient. About a year ago, he said they started using AI models to increase the confirmed ticket level, helping improve the rate of confirmed tickets for passengers by 27 per cent. (ANI)