In order to meet unique Indian needs, Reliance Jio, the country’s largest service provider, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) will collaborate to develop an indigenous large language model (LLM) as part of the Bharat GPT program.
“We have been working on a project with IIT Bombay to launch a Bharat GPT program,” Reliance Jio chairman Akash Ambani stated at IIT-B’s annual Techfest conference. According to media reports, the goal of this project is to build AI offerings for important business verticals including retail and telecom. Reliance Industries holds a noteworthy position in both of these sectors.
Several academic institutions are collaborating in the Bharat GPT consortium, however IIT-B serves as its leader. The International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad, Bhashini, a branch of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, IIT Madras, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, and IIM Indore are a few of these.
It’s unclear if Jio’s Bharat GPT is connected to BharatGPT, which was introduced by CoRover.ai, an AI startup supported by the iHub Anubhuti IIITD Foundation, IIIT Delhi’s technology innovation hub, last year.
Ambani went into further detail about how AI will be crucial to Jio 2.0, the company’s broader plan for the following stage of its expansion. “Jio was always established as a firm helping India’s digital society. Naturally, we had to start with the connectivity aspect as India as a whole would not have access to information without that fundamental infrastructure. And we achieved it with Jio 1.0,” Ambani adds.
The business will now introduce AI “not only as a vertical within our organization, but also horizontally across all our sectors” as part of Jio 2.0. Thus, you’ll notice that we’re particularly concentrating on introducing goods and services in the media, commerce, and communication stack as well as on all of our devices.” He stated that generative AI and huge language models will be the defining technologies of the next ten years. Apart from this, Jio is also creating its own television operating system.
Reliance’s goals with AI
The Reliance Group wants to be an AI company. On December 28, the day of Dhirubhai Ambani’s birth, Reliance Industries founder Mukesh Ambani gave a speech to the company’s employees that made this evident. In order to assist the nation in addressing issues in the priority sectors of healthcare, education, agriculture, and employment, Mukesh Ambani stated that the organization needs to focus on AI products.
“We must lead the way in leveraging data, and artificial intelligence (AI) will help us achieve a dramatic increase in output and efficiency. By the time we meet again the following year, every one of our growth engines—Reliance, digital services, green and bio-energy, retail and consumer brands, O2C and materials business, health and life sciences—will need to have finished this transition. In his year-end speech, Ambani stated, “In addition, we should step up our efforts to become leaders in AI development to address and scale India’s urgent national priorities in education, healthcare, agriculture, and job creation.”
Reliance Industries has teamed together with Nvidia to create cloud infrastructure, language models, and generative apps in order to fulfill its AI ambition. Nvidia will supply the processing power needed to develop an AI cloud infrastructure platform, and Jio will take care of infrastructure management and customer relations. “To serve India’s vast potential in AI, Reliance will create AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India,” according to a news statement released by Nvidia.
