Central Govt Approves Ambitious AI Mission; Know Its Target

New Delhi: The pros and cons of artificial intelligence (AI) may be a subject of debate, but its importance just cannot be undermined.

That the Indian government is fully aware of AI’s scope was demonstrated by the Union Cabinet on Thursday when it approved the setting up of an AI Mission with an outlay of over Rs 10,000 crore.

The primary aim of the mission is to set up a holistic ecosystem for the development of AI in India, Union Minister Piyush Goyal announced on Thursday while informing about various Cabinet decisions.

The focus of the mission will be to develop an end-to-end structure starting with the education of youngsters in the emerging field to setting up innovation centres and creating compute capacity.

Listing seven pillars of the mission, an official PIB release stated that public and private sectors will collaborate to create a compute capacity of more than 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) which can cater to the needs of startups and promote research.

AI innovation centres will also be set up to develop Large Multimodal Models.

The release said India ranks first in terms of AI skill penetration and access will be facilitated to courses on AI at the undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD levels.

At least 200 AI and data labs will be set up in tier 2 and 3 cities to impart foundational-level courses.