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“Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it to create synthetic data, build small language models quickly, and train them using appropriate data…” Nilekani said last year.  

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Even as the country has selected its AI cavalry, questions that may come to mind are — what are we developing and how far have we come to live our Indic LLM dream? This is precisely what we will try to comprehend today. 

So, What’s Being Served At India’s Big AI Feast?

• Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation
• Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications
• Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks 

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However, one major aspect is clear — each of these companies will get computational support or access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for training their data. This would lower the cost of building LLMs.

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While Gopalan did not reveal what else the company’s proposal to the IndiaAI Mission entailed, he said that the government is looking to solve two major problems as part of these collaborations — making GPUs more accessible and bringing down the cost of building LLMs.

India And GPUs: Are We Still Playing Catch Up?

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In the current scheme of things, computational support becomes imperative to keep the development costs low, especially when VCs are more interested in funding AI applications and not foundational models due to their longer turnaround times and hefty investments.  

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Aakrit Vaish, former Haptik CEO and ex-advisor to the IndiaAI Mission, is wary of a situation where the Centre approves proposals from 12-13 companies and the existing compute capacity gets exhausted. 

Why GPUs Are Still The Bottleneck For India?

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“GPUs are as valuable as gold. With some top global companies like OpenAI taking up the largest chunks of GPU clusters, there has been a struggle to get GPUs in markets like India, particularly, the latest GPUs,” said Gnani.ai’s Gopalan.

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“For a long time, there were many GPUs available in the market, but not enough companies to use them. Now, there has been a sudden spike in demand for building LLMs. Right now, the Indian government is trying to bridge that supply gap,” he said.

What’s Next For India’s Sovereign AI Efforts?

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“We can’t afford to be passive users of someone else’s models; we need to lead. But leading doesn’t mean building just another massive LLM. Now, the real next opportunity lies in building the next generation of models — models that go beyond just text and voice. Think world models, systems that understand and reason, models aligned with sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, governance — built for our realities, in our languages, with our context.”