Latest news with #GaneshGopalan
Hindustan Times
17-06-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Access to GPUs is a national concern: Gnani AI CEO Ganesh Gopalan
The biggest issue artificial intelligence (AI) companies face today is access to compute and the cost to building large language models (LLMs), Ganesh Gopalan, CEO and founder of Gnani AI, said during an interaction with HT. Selected under the Ministry of Electronics and Information technology's (MeitY) 'India AI Mission' to build a foundational model for India, Gnani AI's CEO said the government is yet to clarify how much AI compute will be subsidised or what other benefits the company can expect under the programme. Access to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is a national concern, Gopalan told HT over a call, noting that more advanced versions of GPUs are continually being released. 'Some of the newer GPUs have much more computational power, but if they are going to be available after some time, is it worth waiting for them,' he said. Under the India AI Mission, the government has selected four startups — Gnani AI, Sarvam AI, Soket AI, and Gan AI — from a pool of 506 proposals to build home-grown foundational models. How will these foundational models differ from OpenAI's GPT or Meta's Llama? They will be built from the ground up using India-specific datasets, languages, and cultural contexts. While there is still some ambiguity within startups around the exact support being offered, MeitY secretary Abhishek Singh said in an April podcast that, in addition to nearly fully subsidising compute, the government will also cover costs related to engineering, personnel, and data. According to India AI's compute portal, Sarvam AI has received 4,096 fully subsidised GPUs, valued at over ₹246 crore. In total, the government has allocated 4,423 GPUs under the scheme till now, with a cumulative subsidy amounting to ₹259.89 crore. The rest of the subsidies have been allocated to researchers, early stage startups and government entities. The government has also called rounds of GPU empanelment, in which by now they have a capacity of over 34,000 GPUs, of which they have made 14,000 GPUs available online on their platform. Gopalan along with Ananth Nagaraj started the company seven years ago. Fast forward to 2025, Gnani AI has over 100 clients and is building 14 billion-parameter voice-to-voice foundational AI models for India, aimed at enabling instant and natural conversations without human intervention. The company plans to initially launch a model supporting 14 languages, gradually expanding to cover 22 languages. The startup has a three-pronged aim: reduce latency, increase accuracy and infuse emotional intelligence in their LLM. 'The models aim to enable emotionally aware conversations, preserving intonation, stress and rhythm in the conversations. The model uses a fused architecture to reduce inherent latencies and errors that cascade through the pipeline,' explained Gopalan. Gnani AI has built a substantial dataset of 14 million hours of annotated audio, with the team initially spending two to three years collecting and curating the first set of data. 'We collected a lot of data all across India when we started in 2016, often at 1/1000 the cost of what a large company would collect it at because we were a hungry startup without money,' said Gopalan jokingly. 'The dialects change in India every few kilometers. We would find out which districts we haven't collected data from and we would go there and collect it.' When asked whether the company buys data, the CEO responded, 'Why should I buy data for $100 an hour when we know how to get it for ₹100 an hour?' Gnani AI collects data using many methods like using open-source datasets, working with language experts for lesser-resourced languages, and building proprietary data through a wide range of gamified mobile apps to collect diverse speech data for training its models. 'We sometimes also requested people to send over their voice through WhatsApp. Some of those were also given free by people, when we told them 'look, we are building this (LLM) for your language,' said Gopalan. His team is also looking at AI Kosh, a government platform where government and private datasets have been made available. While Sarvam AI said in April that it will come out with it foundational model in six months, Soket AI Labs has set a one-year delivery timeline. Gnani has set a timeline of six to eight months to deliver the first version of its model once it receives access to compute resources from the government. Other companies are also showing interest in building foundational models for India. TWO CEO Pranav Mistry confirmed to HT that he has submitted his foundational model proposal to the India AI Mission.
Economic Times
30-05-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
After Sarvam.ai, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, Gan.ai to now build foundation AI models, says IndiaAI Mission
IndiaAI Mission on Friday announced Soket AI, and will be developing foundation artificial intelligence (AI) models apart from that was initially selected. ET had reported this more than a month AI will develop an open source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country's linguistic diversity targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare and education. will build a 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real time speech processing with advanced reasoning will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting superhuman text-to-speech (TTS) model capabilities.'We are working on another PhD programme and a large talent development programme starting from the very basic to a really advanced level so that the foundational research in AI can also be funded out of the AI mission,' said IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. 'I hope some of the smart young engineers working on these teams would like to relocate back to India,' he added. He was referring to the three teams selected to build foundation AI models. 'We're proud to lead the way in developing voice-to-voice large language models for India and the world, because we believe transformative AI must speak the language of the people it serves,' said Ganesh Gopalan, co-founder and chief executive of IndiaAI Mission also said there were now 34,333 GPUs available on the IndiaAI Compute portal. These include GPUs of Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs, 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs. The other GPU variants each comprise less than 1,000 or 500 in seven technically qualified bidders in the second round of the GPU tender are empanelled, it said. However, there was no information on how many of these 34,333 GPUs have been assigned AI workloads and are currently being used. The seven empanelled bidders are Cyfuture India, Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Netmagic IT Services (NTT GDC India) Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, and Yotta Data Services. In all, 367 datasets have been uploaded on AI Kosh, Vaishnaw revealed. AI Kosh is the government's platform that provides a repository of datasets, models and use cases to enable AI innovation. It also features AI sandbox capabilities. IndiaAI Mission said on May 16 it had received 506 foundation AI proposals across the three phases. Given the overwhelming response and continued interest, the mission has decided to extend the deadline for submissions under phase 3 of the call for proposals. The earlier deadline was April 30.'Further dates for submission of proposals, the acceptance of new applications post April 30, will be announced subsequently, as per requirements, once the examination of proposals already submitted has been completed," IndiaAI said on its part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational multi-modal, multi-scale model will have 70 billion parameters. It is developing three model variants. These include Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) for six months from the IndiaAI Mission.
India Gazette
11-05-2025
- Business
- India Gazette
Technology a force multiplier for inclusive growth, say techies on National Technology Day
New Delhi [India], May 11 (ANI): National Technology Day, celebrated on May 11 every year, commemorates the momentous events of this day back in 1998, when India conducted successful nuclear tests under Operation Shakti, and saw the maiden flight of the indigenously developed Hansa-3 aircraft. In recognition of these achievements, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared May 11 as National Technology Day. Over the years, National Technology Day has evolved into a flagship occasion for honouring scientific excellence, showcasing industrial innovations, and reinforcing the partnership between science, society, and industry. Scientific temperament in India has increased over the years - from space to telecom, semiconductors to AI, biotechnology to fintechs. Here are some of the perspectives from people in technology domain on India's growing prowess: According to Ganesh Gopalan, Co-Founder and CEO, at AI services provider India's relentless pursuit of innovation, and a reminder of how technology can be a force multiplier for inclusive growth. 'Today, breakthroughs in Voice AI, multilingual large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI are empowering enterprises to build smarter, more human-centric solutions. From revolutionizing customer support and financial services to enabling real-time healthcare assistance in regional languages, AI is reshaping how industries operate and interact. As India's digital ecosystem accelerates, it is crucial that innovation remains responsible, ethical, and tailored to local as well as global needs,' Gopalan noted. India ranks 39th in the Global Innovation Index (GII), which presents vast opportunities for developing advanced, innovative and sustainable technologies which will help drive the country's digital vision forward. Anku Jain, Managing Director, MediaTek India, said, 'India's technology sector continues to be a strong pillar showcasing prominent and immense growth, powered by innovation in semiconductors, connectivity, and digital infrastructure. At MediaTek, we believe that fostering local R&D, strengthening the semiconductor ecosystem, and investing in skill development will be key to supporting India's ambitions as a global innovation hub.' The official theme for National Technology Day 2025 -- 'YANTRA - Yugantar for Advancing New Technology, Research & Acceleration.' 'National Technology Day is a celebration of India's spirit of innovation, a force that continues to shape a more sustainable and resilient future,' said Sriram Kannan, Founder and CEO, Routematic. 'As we pioneer AI and data-driven, eco-conscious mobility solutions, we witness every day how technology can reimagine urban transport, making it cleaner, smarter, and more efficient.' According to Rupesh Kumar, Co-Founder and CTO, Suhora Technologies, technology today is no longer confined to research labs; it permeates every aspect of our lives, from defence and national security to smart farming and sustainable cities to precision healthcare and digital finance. 'The space industry, particularly the downstream segment, is no exception. AI is now revolutionising the way we process and analyse Earth observation data, making it faster, smarter, accurate and more efficient,' Rupesh Kumar added. (ANI)
