Vaishnaw cites Chandrayaan-3 to boast India's potential to develop low-cost AI models

New Delhi: Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw cited India's ultra low-cost moon mission Chandrayaan-3 to showcase the country's innovation potential to bring down the cost of AI development.

In a panel discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the minister said that very soon the government will come up with an open competition for startups to invite technical solutions that many government departments are looking for.

"Our young entrepreneurs, startups, researchers are really focused on getting that next level of innovation which will reduce the cost. Our country, sent mission to the moon at a fraction of the cost that many other countries did. Why can't we do a model which will be a fraction of the cost that many other countries do? Innovation will bring that cost down," Vaishnaw said.

India's moon mission Chandrayaan-3 was worth Rs 600 crore while other countries have spent multi-billion dollars in moon exploration.

Altman, after dismissing India's potential to develop a low-cost foundational model for AI like ChatGPT in 2023, has now changed his view with advancement in the field of AI and sees India as a potential leader in the AI revolution.

Vaishnaw said that India is now working on the entire ecosystem of AI development including building own chipsets, providing compute facility at low cost as well as working on data sets that will be used for training the models in Indian context in terms of language, cultural and regional nuances etc within the country.

The government is likely to provide access to GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) high-end computer to Indian enterprises and startups at a cost of USD 1.6 per our which at presents costs over USD 6 per hour for the Indian firms.

Altman said the cost of an intelligence unit - a module in AI development - is gong to come down by 10 times by end of this year.

He said, however, reasoning modules are not cheap and "it's still expensive to train them, but it's doable. I think that's going to lead to an explosion of really great creativity and India should be a leader there".

Adding to Altman's point, Vaishnaw said innovation to reduce cost can come from anywhere in the world.

"Why shouldn't it come from India? Our young entrepreneurs, our startups, our researchers, they are really, really focused on getting that next level of innovation which will reduce the cost," he said.