Google announces new India-focused AI models, tools and initiatives
Google hosted its Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 event on Wednesday (July 17). During the event, the tech giant announced new artificial intelligence (AI) models, a new benchmarking tool and several new initiatives, all aimed at the Indian AI community. The company opened access to the Gemma 2 AI model to all developers and highlighted that it has been designed to be more adaptable to Indian languages. Google also announced its partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Startup Hub to support the country’s startup ecosystem.
In a press release, Google claimed that more than 1.5 million developers globally have used Gemini models to build AI-powered tools and apps. The company is also focused on strengthening its developer community by providing access to multi-modal AI models with longer context windows. Google also highlighted that India had one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio, which can be used to build new AI tools with Gemini.
To further help developers build better tools, the Gemini 1.5 Pro model with a context window of two million tokens was made available to all developers in India. Notably, the company added a waiting list to access the model earlier this year. In addition, the Gemma 2 small language model (SLM) was also released for developers.
According to Google, Gemma’s tokeniser, which breaks text into smaller units for AI processing, could be a key tool for building multilingual solutions that cater to the different languages spoken in India.
The tech giant has also open-sourced its Composition of Language Models (CALM) framework, which allows developers to combine their specialized language models with Gemma to create more efficient solutions. The company gave the example that a developer building a coding assistant in English could potentially also offer coding assistance in Kannada by composing with a Kannada-specialized model in CALM.
In addition to AI models, Google also introduced IndicGenBench, a new benchmarking tool designed for Indian languages. The company claims that it covers 29 different regional languages, including languages that haven’t been benchmarked yet.
Several partnerships and initiatives were also announced during the event. Notably, Google is partnering with MeitY Startup Hub to support the Indian startup ecosystem in their AI efforts.
Google is offering up to $350,000 (approximately Rs. 2.9 crore) in Google Cloud credits to eligible AI startups to help them with the infrastructure and computing power needed to build and deploy AI technologies. The company will also help startups develop AI skills, knowledge and mentorship by providing AI-first programming and curriculum through existing programs like Startup School and Appscale Academy. It will also organize a nationwide Gen AI Hackathon, a three-month experience to support early-stage startups.
