The US currently boasts major tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, and Google, along with startups like OpenAI, spearheading AI advancements. Similarly, China is close behind, just a year away in the AI race, with giants like Alibaba and Tencent, as well as emerging players such as 01.AI, leading the charge. And India?
“We need someone to engage as a frontline player in this space actively. Someone who has the resources to start from scratch; not relying on existing solutions but creating foundational models,” Stition.ai founder and Devika creator Mufeed VH told AIM in the latest episode of Tech Talks.
Further, he said that Indian companies can either sponsor or utilise their resources for these initiatives, yet no one has taken the initiative to start. “However, I am optimistic that India will develop a foundational model within this year,” he said.
Is India’s ‘Jio Moment in AI’ Coming Soon?
Recently, Reliance Jio collaborated with NVIDIA for the use of GH200 GPUs to build AI models in India. During his visit to India last year, NVIDIA head Jensen Huang was optimistic about Reliance building its own LLMs that power generative AI applications made in India.
For now, Reliance Jio is keeping its AI developments under wraps, with no public disclosures to date. “Reliance wants to revolutionise the enterprise space with the use of AI… There is a centre of excellence with 100 experts working on AI solutions. Mukesh believes it is going to be transformative,” said Reliance New Energy Council chairman R A Mashelkar, in a recent interaction with Fortune India.
Meanwhile, Jio recently launched Jio Brain, positioned as the industry’s first 5G-integrated ML platform. It aims to empower telecom networks, enterprise networks, and industry-specific IT environments to incorporate ML tools into their day-to-day operations seamlessly.
TWO, a startup backed by Reliance Jio, also recently launched a family of models called SUTRA. These cost-efficient, multilingual GenAI models excel in 50+ languages, offering speech, search, and visual processing capabilities.
Renowned startup accelerator JioGenNext introduced its latest cohort, MAP’ 24, consisting of ten dynamic, generative AI startups spanning diverse sectors such as healthcare, banking, legal services, entertainment, and agriculture.
Earlier this year, Jio also partnered with IIT Bombay to bring about initiatives like BharatGPT, which focuses on developing AI solutions for several sectors, including the telecom and retail sectors. However, there have not been any significant revelations yet.
Adani AI Labs, an initiative by the Adani Group aimed at leveraging AI to tackle large-scale industrial problems, is also working on exciting AI projects and bringing them to the masses. One such notable work led us to ‘Train PNR Prediction,’ which predicts the confirmation probability of waitlisted train tickets, which will be useful for end users.
“We have achieved 95% accuracy in predicting it,” said Adani Digital Labs senior manager Gaurav Jain to AIM.
India is not left behind. Other giants like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and LTIMindtree seem focused on enterprise solutions, upskilling and reskilling, alongside experimenting with real use cases.
Last year, Tech Mahindra became the first IT giant to launch something like a Generative AI Studio. The IT solution provider introduced Tech Mahindra amplifAI0->∞, a comprehensive suite of AI offerings and solutions aimed at democratising and responsibly scaling AI deployment.
It is also working on an indigenous LLM in 40 different Indic languages, most notably Hindi. Called Project Indus, the model will be able to speak in many Indic languages.
One prominent initiative taking flight in India is AI4Bharat, which started as a collaboration between IIT Madras and Nandan Nilekani’s EkStep Foundation. It is sponsored by Bhashini, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA, with its contribution to the Indic open-source AI community tremendous. But the problem is, it is the only prominent one in the country so far. That’s why India needs more ‘AI4Bharats’.
The time is ripe, and Indian conglomerates and IT giants can do a lot more. Recent earnings from big tech companies show growth driven by advancements in generative AI, and it’s unlike anything seen before.
China Is a Year Away From the US. And India?
“People in China cannot access ChatGPT, OpenAI blocked China from accessing it,” revealed 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee, saying that his country shouldn’t be left out of this revolution.
“I strongly believe that the US will lead in breakthrough innovations, but China is better at execution,” said Lee.
01.AI is a Chinese AI startup that only emerged about a year ago and is already at a billion-dollar valuation. It takes pride in calling itself open source, giving away its AI models to cultivate a loyal developer community that can contribute to the creation of groundbreaking AI applications. The startup also raised $200 million in investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Lee believes that Chinese companies have closed the AI gap between the US and China greatly by executing better.
“Taking my company as an example, we were eight years behind a year ago. Now we’re probably less than one year behind the top American company,” he said.
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says otherwise. He had earlier said that China is focused on dominating several industries, but as of now, the US still maintains a significant lead in AI.
“In the case of AI, we are well ahead two or three years, probably, of China, which in my world is an eternity,” he added.
The rapid AI advancements coming from China question this claim. Brands such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei have become household names in China, and these are the very companies investing heavily in generative AI and releasing AI models like there is no tomorrow.
Last year, Alibaba developed Qwen-72B, Tencent released ‘Hunyuan’, and Lee’s AI startup, 01.AI, also open-sourced its foundational LLM called Yi-34B.
China has also released a SORA rival, named ‘Vidu’, and recently, French luxury group LVMH also extended its partnership with the Alibaba Group to integrate Alibaba Cloud’s generative AI capabilities, including Qwen and Model Studio (Bailian), to enhance customer experience in China.
Lately, the internet has been abuzz with new AI developments coming from China daily—from posts about teachers in China using AI to grade exams to Chinese developing military robot dogs.
Chinese scientists also developed the world’s first AI child entity called Tong Tong.
It’s high time Indian conglomerates and IT giants took the lead in disrupting the AI space.
