‘India AI Mission official pat for Telangana’

MeitY Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh 
| Photo Credit: N. Ravi Kumar

The Centre’s India Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission that has kickstarted work on building a comprehensive ecosystem to foster AI innovation in the country views Telangana as a very promising partner, a senior official in the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said here on Thursday.

The government of India may lay down the policies and provide funding, but the actual implementation happens at the State level. “We look at Telangana as a very promising partner of the India AI Mission,” Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh said, pointing to how the State has emerged as an AI leader. It had declared 2020 as the year of AI and taken initiatives to establish an AI City as well as extend incentives to companies for setting up data centres.

Mr.Singh, who spoke to media on the sidelines of the two-day Global AI Summit that began in Hyderabad, said various other States, including Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, were giving incentives to companies for setting up data centres. “We hope some of the AI compute infrastructure we are setting up will come up in such progressive States,” he said.

On the AI application development front, Telangana has been a leader in providing data sets and trying to give incentives to startups. It has also initiated several used cases. “Telangana is a progressive State which kind of incentivise adoption of AI solutions…” he said.

To queries on the IndiaAI Mission, Mr.Singh said the Mission has been approved and based on seven pillars by democratising computing access, foundational models, application development, datasets, skilling, startups and framework for safe and trusted AI. Among the measures initiated is the floating of an RFP for empanelling service providers who can offer compute infrastructure to those who need such as researchers, startups and academicians. Government will subsidise the cost of access to the users.

Several companies had evinced interest in the pre-bid meeting and atleast 10,000 GPUs are likely to be set up under the project. The project apart, companies have also announced plans to establish GPUs and “with the kind of commitments 50,000 GPUs could be established within 2-3 years in the country,” he said. The Mission is also scouting for a national data management officer.