NEWS – Union Cabinet approves India AI Mission

HIGHLIGHT

• Computing capacity, or compute, is among the most important elements of building a large AI system apart from algorithmic innovation and datasets
• Under the India AI Mission, the government will look to establish a computing capacity of more than 10,000 GPUs
• Benefit – develop foundational models with a capacity of more than 100 billion parameters, trained on datasets covering major Indian languages for priority sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and governance
• During the infrastructure’s setup, a priority will be placed on selecting the most advanced GPUs – implemented through a public-private partnership model with 50 per cent viability gap funding
• If the compute prices come down, the private entity will have to add more compute capacity within the same budgeted amount to meet increased demand
• The government will also finance deep tech start-ups at various levels of growth
• An IndiaAI Datasets Platform will also be set up as part of the programme which will look at leveraging the quality, access, and use of non-personal datasets for AI innovation
• BENEFIT – Bring down costs
• Current scenario – Computing capacity is one of the most difficult elements to procure for smaller businesses looking to train and build such AI systems, given the high costs
  • For example, Nvidia’s A100 chip – considered to be the most cutting edge for AI applications – costs around $10,000, meaning that a data centre of 10,000 such graphics processing units (GPUs) could cost at least $100 million (roughly Rs 8,000 crore)