Reliance’s ‘Hanooman’: Mukesh Ambani-backed ChatGPT to be launched in March. Details here

In a significant step towards the development of indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) in India, the BharatGPT group, backed by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and top engineering schools in the country, aims to launch its first ChatGPT-style service next month.

The AI model is being developed in collaboration with eight Indian Institutes of Technology and is backed by Reliance Jio Infocomm and the central government.

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The consortium — which includes Reliance and eight IITs—offered a sneak peek of the model during a recent technology conference in Mumbai. The model — dubbed Hanooman—displayed a motorcycle mechanic interacting with the AI bot in Tamil, a banker conversing with the tool in Hindi and a Hyderabad-based developer using the tool to write a computer code.

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The model will work via 11 local languages in four fields: healthcare, governance, financial services and education. 

The model ‘Hanooman’ will also offer speech-to-text capabilities, making it vastly more user-friendly, Bloomberg quoted Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chair of IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering as saying, on the sidelines of the annual Nasscom IT industry conference. 

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It may be noted that some other startups like Sarvam and Krutrim, backed by prominent VC investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and billionaire Vinod Khosla’s fund, are also working on open-sourced AI models customised for the country.

The report said Reliance Jio plans to build customised models for specific uses. The telecom-to-retail conglomerate is already working on ‘Jio Brain’, a platform to use AI across a network of about 450 million subscribers.

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Large Language Models or LLMs are systems that learn from vast quantities of data and generate natural-sounding responses. Such models harness generative AI, a newer type of artificial intelligence popularised by the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

BharatGPT’s effort in this space is somewhat unique — it’s the first private-public partnership of its kind in the country and involves major players in disparate fields.