How Google plans to fuel AI innovation in India

During the Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event, the company announced it is working with MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 startups in AI, among a range of other tools and programmes to help drive AI innovation in India

By Forbes India

Published: Jul 18, 2024 03:41:55 PM IST

Updated: Jul 18, 2024 04:34:32 PM IST

On Wednesday, Google announced a range of tools, programmes and partnership to help drive innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). During the Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event, the company said it is working with MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 startups in AI, through Google Cloud credits, AI-first programming curriculum, and launch of a nationwide GenAI Hackathon and AI Startup Bootcamp.

The company is looking to democratise AI for Indian developers by focussing on three key areas with transformative potential in India: Multimodal, multilingual, and mobile. Developers in India will now have expanded access to Google's powerful AI models with the 2 million token context window in Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemma 2, the next generation of open models.

“AI is a powerful enabler and a major inflection point that will require us to continuously reimagine what's possible. We're committed to empowering Indian innovators to harness AI's full potential, creating solutions that not only address India's unique needs but also shape the future of AI globally,” said Ambharish Kenghe, vice president, Google. Today, more than 1.5 million developers globally use Gemini models across its tools. The fastest way to build with Gemini is through its developer platform Google AI Studio, and India has one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio today.

Additionally, the Google DeepMind team shared updates to empower developers building language solutions for India. This includes the expansion of Project Vaani, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which provides developers with over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts. “India is at the forefront of the AI revolution, as you can see from the innovation that Indian companies are pioneering. From consumer experiences, to agriculture, to social enterprises, AI has the power to address some of the biggest challenges of our time across many sectors and industries,” said Seshu Ajjarapu, senior director, Google DeepMind.

The team also introduced IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate generation capabilities of LLMs on Indic languages, and open-sourced CALM (composition of language models), a framework that allows developers to combine specialised language models with Gemma models.

Also read: How Google is combatting spammy content in the age of AI

Additionally, Google is introducing Google Wallet APIs to simplify the integration of loyalty programmes, tickets, and gift cards. For developers using Google Maps Platform, India-specific pricing is being introduced with up to 70 percent lower costs on most APIs. “At Google, we believe all developers are AI developers, and we want to make it as easy as possible for them to build with AI across surfaces, be it web, mobile, or cloud,” said Jeanine Banks, vice president and general manager, Developer X, Google. “We've been thrilled and inspired by the enthusiastic embrace of our AI capabilities by India’s growing developer ecosystem, and we can’t wait to see the innovations they will pioneer with Google’s expanding AI models, tools, and app development suite announced today.”

Google is also collaborating with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), offering developers building for ONDC up to 90 percent off on select Google Maps Platform APIs. The company will also soon launch the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, a limited availability tool designed to make agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient.