Indian colleges accelerate work on Indic languages gen AI

Generative AI platforms have been the rage since the second half of last year with Microsoft and Google pushing these programs into their existing services. Even the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), on 3 February, said it is "cognizant" of the emergence and proliferation of generative AI and noted that AI can be a "kinetic enabler" for growth in India. However, researchers at institutes underline a host of challenges for generative AI projects in academia, the biggest of which lie in sourcing ample data of Indic languages, the cost of such projects, and the scale of computing power needed. Indian researchers have been working on such projects for more than three years. "In academia, we're using techniques from language models, namely the transformer architecture, for different tasks such as classification of data, answering questions, machine translation and building chatbots," said Tapas Kumar Mishra, assistant professor of computer science engineering at National Institute of Technology (NIT), Rourkela.