Meet BharatGen, IIT Bombay's own AI start-up
What's the story
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has taken a major step forward by launching its own artificial intelligence (AI) company, BharatGen Technology Foundation. The move comes as part of the institute's vision to shape the future of AI in India. The firm was registered with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai last month.
Project details
BharatGen: A unique initiative to build India's 1st LLM
BharatGen is India's first attempt at creating a Large Language Model (LLM) that reflects the country's linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. The project was launched last year with an initial funding of ₹235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology (DST). It is part of DST's National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) and involves several top institutions such as IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, and IIIT Hyderabad among others.
AI strategy
Unique approach to AI development
BharatGen aims to work across over 22 Indian languages and integrate text, speech, and document vision. This would allow AI systems to understand information as citizens naturally speak or read. The project's strength lies in training systems on home-grown datasets and Indian languages, an approach that is expected to make them more reliable in real-world applications.
Expansion goals
BharatGen's future plans and funding
The foundation plans to release distilled versions of its models to developers, enabling start-ups and enterprises to access sovereign AI without the cost/expertise of training large systems independently. The initiative has also received an additional ₹1,058 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission, making BharatGen a national sovereign AI effort.