AI for India: Reliance Industries, backed by billionaire Mukesh Ambani is partnering with India’s top engineering schools to launch a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Codenamed Hanooman, the generative AI model is scheduled for a launch in March, as per reports.

Developed as part of the BharatGPT group, which includes Jio Infocomm and IIT Bombay along with eight affiliated universities, the project aims to democratise AI for India.

Testing the Technology

During the NASSCOM Technology Conference in Mumbai, a teaser of the large language model was presented during a technology conference in Mumbai. 
The video showed a motorcycle mechanic in southern India seeking a response from an AI bot in his native language Tamil, while a banker interacted with the tool in Hindi. A developer from Hyderabad used the GenAI to generate computer code.

Set to be working in 11 local languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Marathi, the AI model will focus on core areas of governance, healthcare, education and financial services.

It also aims to extend support to all 22 official languages of India.

The AI will include an intuitive user experience with features like speech-to-text. 

India's AI story

Jio also works with Jio Brain, which uses AI across a network of 450 million subscribers.

At an earlier IIT Bombay event, Reliance Jio Infocomm Chairman Akash Ambani had spoken about the BharatGPT project, saying it is in early stages of development. Aligning with the company's vision to foster a comprehensive system, it is a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership in the AI space. Notably, the partnership between Reliance and IIT-Bombay goes back to 2014.

BharatGPT is a public-private partnership in the AI space. Another Indian app, Krutim, was launched by Ola’s Bhavish Agarwal as an answer to the global advancements of genrative technologies.

Sarvam AI, backed by PeakXV and Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Khosla Ventures, recently partnered with Microsoft for voice-based generative AI. The startup’s founders were earlier involved in developing AI models at the IIT Madras-based research group AI4 Bharat.