India AI, an IBD under Digital India Corporation and Meta, have signed an MoU to foster an innovative collaboration in the field of AI and Emerging Technologies. Shri Abhishek Singh, CEO of India AI and Shri Shivnath Thukral, Director & Head of Public Policy, Meta in India, signed the MoU.

MoU was signed with a motive to launch a ground-breaking framework for the pioneering collaboration and cooperation between India AI and Meta in the domain of Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Technologies, which also leads to making Meta’s open-source AI models available to use in the Indian AI ecosystem.

Shri. Abhishek Singh stated, “India is at the forefront of adopting digital technologies, and it is evident that AI and Emerging Technologies will play a pivotal role in expanding the advantages of technology to a broader population. Through this partnership with Meta, the joint research and development endeavours will tackle large-scale challenges by leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies like Llama and other open-source solutions.”

Sir Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs, Meta opined, “Meta’s open approach to AI innovation is complementary to India’s leadership on digital issues. Giving businesses, startups, and researchers access to these technologies can open up tremendous social and economic opportunities. ‘India AI’ is an exciting programme, and with close collaboration between government and industry, we can strengthen India’s digital leadership and help to ensure AI tools are built for India’s unique needs.”

India AI and Meta have stepped up for a collaborative approach to target advanced research and development in AI & Emerging Technologies and a hunt for breakthroughs in AI technology and its applications.

Furthermore, the organisations will also consider establishing a Centre of Excellence to foster a startup ecosystem of AI & Emerging technologies. By leveraging the AI research models of Meta, such as LlaMA, Massively Multilingual Speech and No Language Left Behind, the partnership will also target building datasets in Indian languages in order to enable the translation and large language models by prioritising low-resource languages. This attempt is also expected to nurture social inclusion, enhance government service delivery and propel innovation using large language models, Generative AI, cognitive systems and translation models.

Moreover, this partnership will help to enhance accessibility to AI computing resources for researchers, startups, and organisations with a limited number of resources. This attempt at knowledge sharing and collaboration in AI & Emerging Technologies will be enabled through various workshops, seminars, conferences, and similar platforms.

 India AI and Meta are dedicated to developing programs and initiatives that enhance AI & Emerging Technologies skills and expertise among researchers, professionals and students in India, contributing to the growth of AI talent in the country.

Essentially, ‘India AI’ and Meta aim to raise awareness about AI’s potential benefits and risks among various stakeholders, including policymakers, businesses, civil society, and the general public. They are also planning to work together to promote responsible AI practices by collaboratively developing comprehensive tools and guidelines.